by S. L. Lim
Chunhua looked uncomfortable. ‘I mean …’ she began, and then broke off. ‘You know, what they do … um, you know … what they do in bed.’
‘I see. And you find this disgusting, do you?’
‘Well – yes.’
‘Have you had sexual intercourse before?’
Chunhua looked at her blankly. ‘What?’
‘I said, have you had intercourse before? Describe it to me, please. What does your husband do when you are in bed? What do you do to him? How do you touch? What fluids come out?’ Yannie felt her face grow hot. ‘Tell me, how is it that you are not disgusting?’
‘I’m sorry, Auntie Yannie – I didn’t mean …’
Shuying returned, bearing sliced mooncake and a pot of jasmine tea. ‘Oh no, look at the two of you. One minute together, and already you are fighting! Chunhua, please go back to your room. Auntie Yannie is only here for a short time. She and I need to discuss some things together.’
Chunhua looked scandalised. She pushed back her chair with a dramatic flourish and flounced back to her childhood bedroom, looking more like a teenager than the lady of the manor she so clearly aspired to be. Shuying sat down on the couch and glared at Yannie. ‘What is wrong with you, eh? You haven’t been back home for twenty-four hours, and already you want to start a fight? What were you saying to her?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ Yannie passed a hand over her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Shuying. I’m not used to the younger generation, that’s all.’
‘Not used to them? You are a teacher! You should know how to stay calm when young people say stupid things!’ Shuying glowered for a moment, and then softened. ‘There’s no need to argue with that girl. I’m her mother, I should know. She likes to provoke. She says things trying to get a reaction, but you can just ignore her silly ramblings. You know how she is.’
‘I know, I know.’ Yannie looked round the walls of the living room, which were clean and freshly painted. There were no gaps where the paint was flaking, or where the wall itself had begun to sink. In spite of, or perhaps because of, this state of cleanliness and good repair, the room felt comfortable and well-lived in – truly a family residence. There was a single tissue box by the sofa, covered with a lining of tasselled red and yellow silk.
She crossed one leg over the other. Shuying picked up a cushion and hugged it to her chest. They had both grown very awkward all of a sudden. She noticed Shuying’s necklace, a fine gold chain with a shining point like an arrow hanging down. The arrow rested where the blades of the collarbone met at the centre of the throat.
‘Where did you get that necklace from?’
Shuying looked at her strangely. ‘Yannie, you were the one who bought it for me. Don’t you remember?’
‘No, I don’t.’ Yannie scrutinised it carefully. The chain was thicker than usual for a piece of women’s jewellery. She liked how it rested on Shuying’s skin, which seemed to have acquired a faint tinge of yellow, as if lit from behind by a halogen lamp. She’d noticed it in herself too, the jaundiced look – it was happening to all of them as they aged. Teenage Shuying pounding the track, elbows pumping back and forth, feet leaving the earth and back arching across the sky. ‘Actually, yes, I remember buying that necklace now. But I didn’t know that you would have kept it. I thought you said that you were going to pass it to your daughter after she got married.’
‘I was going to, yes. But in the end, I couldn’t bear to do it. It was so beautiful, and it was a gift from you. So I held on to it for myself.’
‘Does your …’ Yannie hesitated. The path was unstable; each step advanced her further but had the potential to set off a cascade of rocks and earth, sending her tumbling, bleeding and bruised, back to her starting point. She said: ‘Does your husband like how it looks?’
‘No, he absolutely hates it! He says it makes me look like a warrior woman. But men don’t know anything. That’s their problem. Anyway, he doesn’t know that it came from you.’ Shuying laughed and leaned in closer. Her face was covered in foundation, now slightly dulled with sweat after the long day at the crematorium. Yannie could see where the powder had collected in small rivulets, lines carving out a topography across her once glowing and uniform flesh. ‘I told him I bought it for myself. He scolded me a lot. He said that I shouldn’t waste so much money. All men are cheapskates, Yannie, after you marry them. Don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes. While you are still courting, it’s all films and restaurants, nothing is too much. But after you are married, it’s always: “Why do you need something like that? When will you wear it? You look so old!” It only gets worse over the years.’
‘Is that so?’ Yannie tried not to sound overly acerbic. ‘I wouldn’t know. I haven’t spent much time around men – certainly not the kind who would buy me pretty objects.’
Shuying ignored this remark. ‘And children are no better. While they are still young, it’s always, “Can I have this game? This dress? Can I go overseas?” But now they have their own incomes, their own families. They don’t need to think about their parents at all. It’s like you are a TV that is only switched on when they are watching. When they need something, they are all sweetness and light, cookies and cream. But if you need help from them, they become invisible! You call them, and the phone is turned off. You can’t even find out where they have gone.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t have had children, then.’
‘Oh, I’m not saying that. Yannie, you can’t understand. It’s something that every married woman must go through.’
‘Yes, well. Not every woman ends up getting married.’
Without answering, Shuying placed her hand on Yannie’s wrist. Her fingers were surprisingly cool – cold, even. It shouldn’t have been surprising – Yannie too had been suffering from poor circulation lately – and yet it was. She thought again of Shuying at the high jump, and the idea of her developing such an affliction filled Yannie with an unexpected depth of sadness. It’s OK for me to grow old and decay, but not you – never, never, never.
Shuying gripped her arm harder now. She had surprisingly strong fingers. Yannie felt the warmth begin to ease back into her own hands.
‘Follow me,’ she said quietly. The desire in her voice was unmistakable.
Shuying led her by the wrist down the hallway and towards the master bedroom. Yannie glanced sideways, fearful, in case Chunhua was about to come out, but Shuying laughed softly at her and closed the door behind them. The bed was enormous, raised off the floor by a high wooden platform. Mounted on the wall was a full-length, black-and-white, professional wedding photograph of Shuying and her husband, mounted in an elaborate frame. It looked as durable and solid as Yannie imagined monogamy to be.
Shuying sat on the edge of the mattress and motioned for Yannie to join her. Yannie sat down beside Shuying, legs dangling over the edge. She felt very small against the magnificent bed, her little behind barely denting the mattress. She felt very brittle, and little, and silly, and very old. All the arousal had drained out of her.
‘Just so you know,’ she said hesitantly, ‘I’ve changed. I’m not the same as I used to be.’
Shuying let out a yelp of delighted, intoxicated laughter. ‘Do you think that I am?’
She couldn’t bear to look at Shuying, so she dealt with her own clothes first. She undid the row of buttons, drew her elbows one by one from her linen shirt – the single ‘good outfit’ she’d chosen as appropriate for the occasion. She unhooked her pants and stepped out of them, leaving them to slide down in a crumpled puddle on the floor. She looked down dubiously at her body, the loose flesh around her stomach gathered in two small folds, which were tinged an unwholesome greyish-white.
Then, wearing only bra and underpants, she crawled towards Shuying, who was still fiddling with the frog buttons on her own jacket. She undid these one by one, hands trembling slightly, feeling the warm answering quiver in Shuying’s chest beneath the jacket. She stripped back the garment and sat back on her heels to gaze at the body which lay
beneath.
Shuying had told the truth – she was no longer what she used to be. Her taut, vigorous body, with its centre of vitality and heat, had softened and atrophied. It had given up its athleticism, the strong hamstrings Yannie recalled from school sports days now buried deep within a dimpled coat of flesh. Her smooth, lovely pelt had been abraded and dulled over decades of insults. Like Yannie’s skin, it had inexplicably changed colour, and was now vaguely yellow. There were liver spots on her back and upper arms.
And yet there was continuity between this body and that which Yannie had touched and loved so very long ago. The broad, masculine lines of her chin and cheekbones, inexpertly carved and slightly asymmetrical. Her stiff aureole of hair, flecked here and there with light from the bedside lantern. Her broad grin, with its strong red gums and hungry teeth. The grin that spoke of appetite: the selfish appetite Yannie had always loved, which didn’t distinguish between what Shuying did and what she promised, what she wanted now and where her desires might swerve later. I want you. You are the one I choose. I want you first.
Shuying flicked off the light. Yannie sensed her warmth, her naked weight, as she slipped beneath the covers.
8
Old Songs, New Songs
Afterwards they lay side by side, propped up by pillows underneath their backs. Shuying said, ‘What was he like? I mean, when you found him there in the room.’
‘I don’t remember, really.’ Yannie closed her eyes. ‘I’m not trying to avoid it, I just really don’t. After I realised what had happened, I did my best not to look at his face. I didn’t want to have to think about it. I wanted …’
She was about to say, I wanted to remember him the way he was when he was alive, but this struck her as dishonest. Actually, it was hard to visualise anything about Jun. The words that came to mind all seemed to be absences: nothing wrong with him, no major defects, never a bad word, et cetera, et cetera. That, and a few physical tics: his fragile smile, his nervous, apologetic little laugh. Always ready to accommodate whatever suggestion or preference you had, and you could never elucidate whether it conflicted with his own, if he indeed had any. There was always something weirdly truncated about your interactions with Jun, as if a subtle and yet vital part of the story had gone missing.
She said, ‘I should have looked, I know. I shouldn’t have been so afraid. But I’ve always been scared of these things. If I had seen it properly, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. As it is, I have to leave the light on in the room. I don’t care about the power. I know that seems childish.’
‘It doesn’t seem childish. I understand.’ Shuying rolled over and placed a hand on Yannie’s chest, a casually intimate gesture which Yannie immediately loved. ‘But I’m different from you. I’m not frightened, just very, very angry. I still can’t believe Jun would do this thing to all of us – for no good reason. It would be different if he had been very sick, or running out of money. But everything was going well. I can’t help thinking there must be something we don’t know. At least he should have left some kind of note. You know –’ Shuying leaned in with a secretive look, and Yannie could feel the warmth of her slightly sour-smelling breath brush against her chin – ‘maybe he did, and the family are hiding it from us.’
‘What do you mean, they’re hiding it from us? The police searched the room! They didn’t find anything because there was nothing there. If he had wanted to tell us something, he would have sent us an email. He never used to write us letters, anyway.’ Yannie hoped she wasn’t protesting too much.
‘Yes, but you never know. People do strange things at the end of their life. Maybe his sister wants to keep it hidden. I never trusted her, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised, if he had some kind of grudge against their family. Otherwise why would he do it in their house?’
‘That doesn’t make any sense!’ Shuying went shh and Yannie lowered her voice. ‘Anyway, even if all of these things are true, it doesn’t matter. We’ll never find the note. We’ll never see any of these people again now Jun is gone. Anyway, you shouldn’t gossip.’
‘Yes, yes, you are right. I was just speculating.’ Shuying laid her head on Yannie’s arm. ‘These last few days have been so strange. Sometimes I just feel sad for him, but at other times I don’t, because I am still so angry. He has damaged us all – friends, relatives, colleagues. Some of those people will never recover from his act.’
‘I don’t know, though. I don’t think it’s really damaged us that much. Look at all the guests at his funeral. Nobody even cried.’ It was true, they hadn’t. Throughout the service, Yannie kept searching her brain, replaying random memories and trying to access the appropriate emotion. It was like going through a toolbox in the dark, trying to identify by touch the proper implement for the task before you. But no matter how hard she tried, the sadness she felt was appropriate failed to emerge. Horror, yes, and even guilt, but no real mourning.
She said, ‘It’s strange, I looked up the psychology of suicide on the internet. Normally, when someone takes their own life, their friends are supposed to feel angry, the way that you do. Some people, even if they were very close to the one who died, refuse to go to the funeral. But I don’t feel like that at all. I don’t agree when I hear all these people talking about how it is a terrible crime, or a sin. I mean, I know that what Jun did was bad – for me, and for you, and of course for him. But it’s not my place – I mean, we don’t know what was going through his mind when he decided to do it.’
Shuying rolled away from her. ‘Well, it’s against the rules of my religion, anyway.’ But she said it lightly, and it was clear she held no malice towards Yannie for thinking otherwise. ‘I suppose you’re right. Now that I see it how you do. We always took him for granted, anyway. Maybe this was his way of saying to us, “See, you need me after all! What will you do without me?”’
‘What will I do? That’s a good question.’ Yannie thought about it. She had barely considered Jun to be a part of her dayto-day existence. If you had asked her one month previously what Jun brought to her life, she would have been hard-pressed to give you an answer. Now, however, as she contemplated going about her activities without him, the future seemed newly and unbearably bleak. ‘Actually, I did rely on Jun. I believed that if nothing else worked out, he would still be there, and still be happy to see me. It was all too easy, really. I only had to be a little bit kind to him, even just for a moment, to make him happy. But I couldn’t be bothered most of the time because he annoyed me. To be honest, he used to drive me up the wall.’ Even now, she realised, she didn’t really want to see him. If Jun were to walk in the door now, saying that he was fine, that there had been some ridiculous mix-up at the coroner’s office, she would probably say, ‘Oh, good!’ Then she would make up an excuse to be somewhere else. Jun had been valuable to her, but she’d never particularly liked talking to him.
She said, ‘It was nice to have him there. Still remembering, you know, still caring, even if I didn’t care about him … it was better than nothing. And he knew us both when we were young, and we knew him. Now …’ I could disappear tomorrow, she thought. I could be vaporised off the face of the earth and nobody would notice. Even Kat would probably be glad to get her bedroom back.
Shuying nodded emphatically. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I feel that way too. You and Jun are the only people I’ve kept in touch with from school. Now that he’s gone, it feels like the end of an era.’ She said the last phrase in English. ‘Because he’s really gone away from us now – more than if he’d died of old age, or had a heart attack, like so many other men in their fifties. Now that he’s committed this act, it’s like his memory is gone too. I can’t think of him in the same way anymore.’
‘I can. He feels just the same to me.’ And indeed at this moment Yannie had such a strong intimation of Jun as a person, of his presence, that it would not have surprised her if her phone had begun to vibrate, revealing a Jun-style text message or email. Factual, boring and cheery. Hi, Yannie, how are you? Th
e weather is good. I am going to the library this evening.
Shuying was still talking. ‘It’s good that you can let go of your anger like that. It shows that you’re a naturally forgiving person. I should be like that, too. That’s what it means to be a Christian.’
‘Christian, are you? Then how do you think about all this?’ Yannie made a gesture encompassing the room, the bed, her own and Shuying’s nakedness.
Shuying sighed deeply. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Yannie, don’t ask me these things. I mean, according to my faith it’s wrong, you can’t get around it. There is nothing right about what we just did. The Bible says so, my pastor, everybody at church agrees, so I have to agree with them. But then, you know, I am also confused. Because I also believe, I mean … what consenting adults do is their own business. I try not to think about it too much.’
‘Mmm-hmm.’ Yannie did her best to sound casual, flippant. ‘By the way … has there been anybody else?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I’m saying.’
‘I don’t, actually.’
‘Yes, you do.’ Yannie took a deep breath. ‘I mean, any other people who you’ve slept with.’
‘Yes, of course there has,’ Shuying said sanctimoniously. ‘There’s been Kuang Fah, of course. You know, my husband.’
‘Don’t be silly. Of course I know about him. What about your children, do you think I think there was an immaculate conception? What I’m saying is, has there been anybody else – you know – a woman?’
Shuying sighed again. ‘Don’t ask me these things, Yannie.’
‘Why not? Why can’t I ask?’ Yannie heard the rising belligerence in her voice, the desperation. ‘How many other girls? Fifteen, ten, one dozen? Does anybody else know about these things you do? Does Kuang Fah know?’
