by S. L. Lim
EPILOGUE
Letters from Kat
Hey Auntie Yannie, how are you?
So it’s not so much fun over here at the moment. Everybody is mega stressed out. I kind of thought there would be a cooling-off period after we finished the first round of assessments, but no. Miss Hargreaves took me aside the other day and was like, ‘You have to work very hard if you want to stay in this class.’ And I was like, OK, but I don’t actually want to be here! Obvs I didn’t say so out loud ’cos Mum would kill me.
I saw a good movie on the weekend. It was about this guy who went to the moon to work at an industrial plant. But while he was there he found this other guy who looked just like him, who was his clone, except he thought he was the original and that the other guy was the clone. Anyway, SPOILERS, but … they were all replicants the company had made so they didn’t have to train up a new guy, because the clones would all have the same memories. I thought it was cool. It was the kind of thing you might have liked.
How are things back in the motherland????
xx
*
Yes, I have tricks up my sleeve, but I am not a magician. To start off with, I turn back time. Time present and time past, all of which is always present, unredeemable -
*
Home was sad. What it felt like was an assembly of absences: gaps where her parents, her grandmother, the family shop used to be. Now it was a space in the street which was owned by other people. It had been like this for a while, of course, but her stint overseas seemed to have driven those observations from her memory. She thought about her parents often but was disturbed by how little of them she was able to recall. A habit of standing, a turn of phrase here and there, but their solidity, the vital sum of their personalities, had dispersed into the aether. At one point, she realised with horror she no longer remembered her grandmother’s name. To Yannie, she had always just been Por Por. Eventually it came back to her, but there was no way to avoid what was slowly happening: the dead stripped of selfhood and specificity, only continuing to exist via the flagging memories of the unreliable living.
One day it occurred to her that there was no-one else left who had been there in the house when she was little. As hateful as it had often been, the four of them – her parents, her brother and her – had formed a small, self-contained world within which Yannie had become what she was. Now that she was the only one left, it seemed that preserving this mini-universe was up to her. Even as she thought this, Yannie suspected she was romanticising somewhat – or, if not romanticising, then overstating the causation between what had happened then and what came later. It is tempting, when putting the events of your life into a sequence, to draw a series of arrows mapping out the links between cause and consequence. But she did not feel it was entirely honest to do so. It could be that what had happened in childhood was key to creating this one, this singular edition of Yannie; on the other hand, it could be that she would always have become what she was, whatever did or didn’t happen in her childhood. There was no way of knowing, and it was therefore unproductive to think about. Yet she did.
Strangely, she had an impulse to call and ask her brother about it. He was the only other person who’d been there, so he should know. And this, too, was destabilising – so many hours of her life had gone into hating Shan – now, each time she thought of him, it felt like setting off on what had been an open road and running into a cul-de-sac instead. It wasn’t even that she’d liked the road, particularly. It was just that she was used to it, that was all.
She felt like a clock that was wilfully, defiantly out of sync with the events around her. She wondered if that was what it would be like when she was very old: the visible world receding, replaced by the ephemera of childhood. If that happened, she hoped it would be an idyllic, edited version. Memories of her actual childhood might trigger some unpleasant behaviour to be dealt with by staff in the nursing home, or whoever was stuck with the job of looking after her.
Sometimes she was sideswiped by memories, buffeted so hard that she could barely stand. She tried to remember the last conversation she’d had with her mother – or with her father, for that matter – but to her horror drew a blank. She’d been so exhausted from caring for them that she’d stopped paying attention to their words, focusing only on bodily processes – leakage of fluids, loss or gain of blood pressure, readings from various medical instruments which incrementally lost all meaning. There was only one direction, after all, in which that particular story was tending. Also, there had been just so many close calls, when one or the other of them had been drawn to the brink and come back. You couldn’t be waiting all the time with bated breath, writing down every gasp and nonsensical utterance with the potential to be a last word. Watching out for an event which would only be significant in retrospect.
She stood in the middle of the food court, watching the business of eating and living go on around her. She felt like the fixed point around which the rest of the universe rotates. She knew other people had their troubles and their private anxieties, but from the middle distance they seemed so purposeful, so invested in the business of living and being in the world. They sucked with pink straws from their takeaway juice bags, looping the cords around their elbows. She wanted to be hungry like her compatriots, to long for sugar and oil and salt, but she had no appetite – and food had always been her favourite pastime. But most of the time she only managed a bite or two before losing interest. Her mind was willing, but her body felt increasingly weak. Or maybe her body was strong but her mind was holding back. It was hard to tell the difference, these days.
The velocity with which she continued to speed towards death astounded her.
*
This is a memory play. It is not realistic. It is sentimental and dimly lit. It –
*
She found a job as a lawyer’s personal assistant. Fetched his tea, steeped black to just the strength he liked it. Archived his non-urgent emails, deflected pushy clients who tried to angle for more meetings without more pay. ‘Yannie is wonderful,’ she heard him say to his colleagues, and they all turned to look at her with fatuous smiles, expecting her to glow under the warmth of this praise from on high.
On the weekend, she tutored English to a few loyal remaining students. She was grateful they existed; that her reputation, during her eighteen months overseas, had not deteriorated to the point where she could no longer find paying customers. She told their parents that she had experience teaching to the Australian system of examinations. They listened very seriously and told her of their plans to send their daughters and sons abroad. What they desired to achieve by this varied from parent to parent. For some it was an expression of simple pragmatism, since their offspring were unlikely to get into a decent course at home. But for others there was a more romantic element: a sense that their hometown, while comforting and even beloved to them, was inadequate for the sons and daughters they perceived as expressions of their own adventurous qualities. Some of these parents spent far more than was sensible on this goal, even mortgaging apartments and delaying their retirement. There was a sense these days that you were falling behind if you didn’t have at least one child at a foreign university.
She bought a standing fan and a robot vacuum cleaner. She brushed her teeth, aired her little mattress once a week, and washed the sheets. Once, sweeping out the living room, she found the body of a lizard, flattened and dried into a stiff little silhouette, which she shook out of the dustpan into the pink plastic bag she used to line the bin. No-one thought about recycling here; they had other things to worry about. She bought grass jelly and soy milk at the market and ate it for breakfast every day, and didn’t think about the future, insofar as she could avoid it.
And, just as it always had, the dailiness of the day crowded in on her. At work at first she felt numb, and then she stopped being aware of having feelings at all. She supposed this was a further, even greater state of numbness. She observed the young lawyers (they were all pract
ically embryos to her now) talk and squint and shout and order office-delivery dinners. They ate sitting at their desks, chewing somewhat disgustingly, in the manner of people who don’t care if they’re being watched because they don’t care at all about the opinion of the person who is watching them. Once, one of the senior partners lost his personalised mug, which bore the inscription ‘BUT FIRST: COFFEE’, and which no-one else was supposed to use. It had been picked up out of the dishwasher and used by one of his underlings, probably some naive young clerk who didn’t yet understand how hierarchy was expressed through the medium of crockery. The senior partner’s own assistant was away, and so Yannie was charged with the task of circulating an email to request the mug’s immediate return. It took a few hours, but in the end someone anonymously gave it back. She contemplated spitting in it but decided against this plan. There were probably cameras in the office.
Thinking of work, she tried not to think too much, because that way lay madness. The greater part of her life had been given over to the tedious, the necessary and logistical. But now she’d had the chance to see how the other half lived, and she was furious. The sight of a billboard advertising international flights drove her half-mad, as she thought about Kat, now talking about ‘maybe taking a year off, backpacking around Europe’. She thought of young Shuying in a London hotel, naked on top of crisp white sheets. There were people in the world, she knew now, who counted the density of threads in their bed linen – this was a thing they were aware of. Such was their status in the world – every part of their flesh so extremely important, it could only be exposed to a fabric that exceeded an elevated threshold of softness, suppleness and cleanliness. Their minds did not dwell on such matters as the whereabouts of a senior partner’s drinking vessel. They were free to devote their attention to such rarefied subjects as beauty, learning and truth. Or at the very least making large amounts of money, as opposed to incrementally small sums.
Weirdly, each small pay cheque made her more conscious of cash (and her lack of it) than the periods when she wasn’t being paid at all. You could buy a watermelon juice at a market stall and think, Oh, there goes twenty minutes’ wages. The more time you spent earning, the more you resented having to spend in order to live. In a manner of speaking. If that was what you’d call it, as opposed to metabolising, existing, or not ceasing to exist.
*
Ughh, I am so *tired* of this shit. There’s a billion assessments (ok, that’s an exaggeration, more like one dozen) before we even start the actual HSC. I don’t even understand why they call the exams the ‘trials’, when they go towards your final marks and everything. I’m kind of stressed out, but also bored. I mean, I know that it’s important, BUT I CAN’T BRING MYSELF TO CARE. And really, does it matter *that* much? ’Cos if I do well, I’ll go to uni, and if I don’t, then I’ll still go, and then transfer into a different course later. I don’t see how I could be so crap that I don’t get into anything at all.
After all of this is over, I’m totally going on holiday. Not a gap year, just a holiday, to start off. Mum’s coming too. She wants to see Japan, but I want to go to Thailand. Beaches and stuff. I wanna lie on the sand and drink Fanta and not care about ‘the future’ and what the fuck.
*
Yannie’s mother and father and brother in the suggestion of a living room. Focus on Yannie’s mother centred in a pool of light. Otherwise the stage is empty. The actors are unmoving.
*
She still met up with Shuying from time to time. But something had shifted, disturbing the balance between them. It wasn’t that she had power over her friend – that wasn’t an accurate way to put it – but the scales had clearly tilted in that direction. Yannie was no longer quite so abject, no longer so obviously pathetic, now that she knew Shuying had feelings for her too. Weirdly, though, it wasn’t clear this was an actual improvement. It was plain that Shuying was disturbed by what had happened after Jun died, and she expressed this by behaving with ostentatious indifference. She would invite Yannie over to a dinner with family only, seat her next to her husband, and then stage a conversation that was aggressively banal.
Intellectually, too, Shuying was obviously getting older. Her friend’s mental horizons, never what you’d call expansive, now shrank down to the size of a frozen pea. Each time they met up Shuying would take it on herself to inform Yannie of some new threat, further proof that the way of human life is to scam or be scammed. Snatch thieves, ATM-skimmers, hidden additives in food that would give you cancer. This information she offers Yannie with a hard-bitten, knowing air – further proof, as if any were needed, of the casual depravity which was all you could expect from other people. For Yannie, Shuying was still covered in a hard, gleaming coat of eroticism, now slightly flaking in places. She could tell her friend was terrified, and that she, Yannie, was the cause of all this fear: that she would be revealed, that Kuang Fah would find out about the two of them. She could, she supposed, have made Shuying do anything she wanted, if only by blackmail. But it was not a power that she planned to use, and it drove a wedge between them. She did not flatter herself that Shuying’s fear was anything to do with herself as an individual.
Though they did not meet often, she thought about her friend all the time: the particular smell of her skin, and how it felt to slide a finger into the warm cavity of her body. Maybe in a few years’ time Shuying’s husband would drop dead, and they would move in together – buy a two-bedroom apartment with the insurance money (in her dream, there was insurance) and live out their days cooking, watching TV, and falling asleep tangled up in the same bed together. Yannie would use the spare bedroom to tutor pupils, and they could live off that money. They would share mee goreng lunches, and eat off the same plate, and have cute fake arguments about who should get the last piece of yong tau foo. She extended and elaborated on these narratives. She created a version in which she and Shuying were still recognisably themselves, but slenderer, wittier, with tauter skin and less white hair, and with decades of joyful companionship ahead of them. When not at work, she could lose whole days in these fantasies, half her mind absorbed in some repetitive task (say, washing-up, or ironing), the other half free to devise and script and clothe her lover as it saw fit.
If by chance she came across the real Shuying while she was immersed in this dream, she would experience a horrible sensation, a sick lurch in her stomach. It was more than regret or disappointment – it was embarrassment on Shuying’s behalf. Revulsion, even. That Shuying didn’t look, think, speak as well or as beautifully as the proper, ‘real’ Shuying who existed only in her imagination. Her glorious body, those wonderful haunches – the bright mouth slashed across her face. All of this no longer was in time and space. She had a class photo of Shuying from when she was younger, her perfect eyes narrowed into slits, a slightly roguish look. Standing with her arm casually draped around a classmate’s shoulder, careless hands drifting carelessly round other people’s bodies.
*
I can’t exactly move out, at least not at the moment. Like, Mum would have a total meltdown. She freaks out at me all the time, for really stupid stuff. Like if I come home half an hour later than I said I was going to. I mean, I try to understand, but it’s hard for me too, you know? I miss Dad as well, even though he was a psychopath. And I kind of think, maybe if she hadn’t been so fucking dependent on him and hadn’t tried to organise her life so we would all be stupid chess pieces in a game that she set up, she’d be better at coping now he’s gone. Uggghhh. Anyway, for the moment I’ll stay put.
*
Now Yannie’s mother and father and brother are in the centre of a stage that is otherwise empty. One by one they step forward for a bow. They do this in a cycle, one two three. The cycle does not end. The stage never clears.
*
Kat continued to send semi-regular emails. Unlike her mother, she had accepted the coroner’s verdict of accidental death and bore no grudge against Yannie. She was doing well in life, or so it seemed. Everyone
was worried about the trauma and how it would affect her Year Twelve exams, but in the end she outdid these expectations and got good enough marks to enter medicine or law. She turned both of these opportunities down, choosing instead to study visual arts, and Evelyn was too catatonic with grief to do anything about it. The messages she sent to Yannie were energetic, full of news and very entertaining, sometimes overly consciously so. There were cutesy GIFs and exclamation marks, lots of effortful irony, and here and there a casually dropped sentence about Kat’s artistic progress, buffered before and after by inconsequential remarks. Yannie was touched by Kat’s barely veiled desire for approval but had no idea how to respond. She had never seen approval as a thing that was hers to bestow.
Curiously, Yannie often had an impulse to ring Evelyn, although of course she never followed through. She even had dreams about her sometimes. It wasn’t guilt – she just wanted to talk and couldn’t think of anybody else, now that Jun and Shuying were (mostly) out of the picture. She missed Evelyn’s laugh, her reminisces about the office-based dysfunction at Allwick’s, which echoed certain observations of her own at her new workplace. It wasn’t that the two of them had been best friends (what did that even mean?), but, well, there’d definitely been something there, different from what she’d previously experienced with other people.
