by S. L. Lim
Kat sent Yannie shots of her most recent work, sketches of children with animal bodies and vice versa. Yannie liked some of them and disliked others, and told her so. Kat took it well – ‘I know what you mean, I haven’t got my ideas fully figured out yet’ – and said that she was still working. She would let Yannie know when she had it sorted. At the end of uni she was going to go to Iceland. There was some sort of internship – unpaid, but through which she would garner considerable though nebulous ‘experience’. Also, there was an older female artist with whom Kat had been in correspondence, who would mentor her once she arrived.
‘That sounds like fun,’ Yannie wrote. ‘But make sure you don’t do anything silly, like running round a field without your clothes! I saw that in a movie set in Iceland once.’ Kat wrote back: ‘LOL!’ The money for the trip would come from Shan’s estate, of course.
Meanwhile, Kat was still living with her mother. She would stay at home until Evelyn got her act together sufficiently to survive without her daughter underfoot. Yannie didn’t believe this for a moment. She did not doubt Kat loved her mother deeply. Still, she sensed that the moment a good enough opportunity called, Kat would be gone. She’d have reasons, of course, some of which would sound remarkably altruistic. It wasn’t helping Evelyn to dwell on the past; her mother needed to find a life of her own, she needed to change her old patterns to exorcise her grief, and blah, blah, blah. Kat had lost a father, too – was the rest of her life going to be crippled by this fact? Yannie had seen it before, that gleam of ruthlessness, in equal parts frightening and admirable. (She was aware of the irony of chastising Kat for a lack of family feeling.)
The little icon representing Jun on Yannie’s Skype was set permanently to Offline. She didn’t have the heart to delete it. Once she actually called, just so she could listen to the message saying that Jun wasn’t there. She wondered how scared she would have been if Jun’s voice had answered.
*
At a social event, a minor reunion hosted by one of Yannie’s high school classmates, she was accosted by a garrulous oldish man who behaved like he knew her, even though she had never seen him before. ‘Excuse me! Excuse me! I don’t want to trouble you, but are you Chin Shanshan’s sister? What a coincidence! No, I’m sorry to bother you, but I recognise you from the photo. On the website – at the last Christmas event, you know.’
Yannie blinked. Now that she thought about it, she and Evelyn had attended Shan’s end-of-year company lunch. ‘Yes, that’s me. I went along with my brother and his daughter and wife. Did you used to work for them as well?’
The old man laughed. ‘No, of course not! I am just an old man… I am Sze Wei’s father.’ He gestured towards one of Yannie’s former classmates, who she barely knew. ‘Do you know, I am eighty-five years old this September! My nephew, Nicholas Leung, used to work for your brother. I do not know if you have met him before. He works, I forget his title, but he is one of the junior staff. Skinny-looking guy. Used to wear glasses, but now I think he has contacts …’
Yannie looked curiously at the old man. ‘Yes, I’ve met Nicholas Leung. I don’t know him well but we’ve crossed paths before.’
‘Oh, very good! Do you know –’ the man gestured across the room – ‘he is here with us today! You should go and say hi! It’s very good that he has come back to visit us – it’s good to take your holidays back home. Two of his friends from Australia are staying with him as well. He is taking them round to do the touristy things.’ Sure enough, there was Nicholas Leung, dressed in boat shoes and a polo shirt, accompanied by two young male Caucasians. Both of them were friendly-looking and, in this context, seemed extremely tall and out of scale with their environment. ‘I must say, Nicholas is the best of all my nephews. A few years back, my brother – Nicholas’s father – was having some problems. Made redundant, you see, just after taking out a mortgage. But Nicholas said: “Don’t worry, I’ll pay it off!” And he has been now for nine years already. He works so hard while all the other young boys are having fun – you know, he has only just turned twenty-eight? Your brother …’ He lowered his voice. ‘Such a horrible, shocking accident. I was very sorry to hear what happened to your brother.’
‘Thank you. That’s very kind of you.’
‘Yes, there are terrible things that happen in this world. Just the other day, I heard about a woman in the UK who fell onto the knives in her dishwasher. Slipped on some water on the floor, imagine that! Very sad, our whole family was so sad to hear about it – Nicholas told me many times, Shan was a wonderful boss. And not just Nicholas – many of the old-timers said so. Before, you know, the managers, they treated the business like their own family. They had all known each other for years, you see. They were good friends – but if you were not part of that group, then you were done for. You could work very hard, make a big contribution, and still make no progression in your career. Shan changed that aspect. That is why we are so grateful – he was the only one who gave Nicholas a chance. He has helped us a lot – helped our whole family find their feet. We will always remember.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ Yannie repeated. ‘But I have to go.’
She gave Nicholas Leung a last brief once-over before she left. Their eyes met briefly, and he blinked in semi-recognition, as though having trouble remembering her face. Eventually, recognition dawned, but he didn’t seem interested in pursuing a conversation. He and his friends looked happy, enjoying each other’s company in an uncomplicated way. They were teasing one another in the manner of people who have known each other for a long time. As she passed she heard one of them say they were going to go whitewater rafting. Try as she might, she found it difficult to dislike them.
*
In the background a screen, and on the screen the image of a school. There is the building for the classrooms, and there is the field, and there is the pole for the high jump, now fallen into disuse. In the foreground, a cluster of red ixora flowers –
*
She played Kat’s music often and intently, often staying up till two or three in the morning to continue listening. She spent hours on YouTube looking for new material, but most of what she found seemed facetious or trivial in comparison to what she already had. There were oceans of creative endeavour out there, and most of it was terrible. It was hard to know what to buy or what to listen to so that you could call forth those great tides of feeling. With her headphones on, she oscillated back and forth between disappointment and extravagant joy. Sometimes she would listen to the same song ten, fifteen times over, willing herself to believe her many longings and lusts could be unified into something that was at least coherent. A single point, lacking in dimension or depth. A mathematical construct only, existing outside constraints of regular existence.
Music was strange. Almost everybody her age and older seemed to love karaoke, so she occasionally did it, going out with a group of cousins. Usually they sang songs from the seventies or the eighties, although some were more recent. ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight’. Her cousins loved TV contests, where precocious small children sang songs which could have nothing to do with their own lives, an effect Yannie found rather creepy. But if someone were to express such feelings in real life, her cousins would be uncomfortable, defusing the moment with mockery and laughter. They didn’t like sentiment, Yannie’s relatives; they didn’t approve of navel gazing. If a song came on that sounded like nothing they’d heard before, there would be an uncomfortable pause, and then someone would say: ‘Huh? Is he trying to do the [X] act?’ [insert familiar singer/genre here]. If the song lacked any obvious reference point, an embarrassed, defensive feeling would go round the circle; eventually, someone would pronounce it ‘funny’. The music they enjoyed turned feeling into a technical exercise, unthreatening and easily predicted. It could be incorporated into a defined area of life without risk of unwarranted spillover.
(SingStar was their preferred program for karaoke. One cousin discovered that the p
itch detector, which was supposed to grade your ability to stay in tune, could be foiled by singing extremely loudly. Above a certain volume you were guaranteed an A, no matter how off-key you were. They made use of this discovery.)
Music was different from other forms of entertainment. It made you weirdly defensive when someone else criticised the songs you liked (‘Oh my God, Auntie Yannie, that is so retro’) – this was incisive in a painful way, far worse than if someone told you the TV you watched was shit or that the clothes you wore were ugly. Yannie liked the idea of a friend so close that she could share her most beloved tracks without fear of scathing commentary. But when she shared this with Kat via Skype, her niece was cheerfully scathing about the idea. ‘That is ridiculously lame, Auntie Yannie. That’s what sadbois dream about.’
’Sadbois’, Yannie had learned, were a genre of person which overlapped with, but was nonetheless distinguishable from, the category of boys who were sad. She did not see why this should be a pejorative, but humbly accepted Kat’s opinion, as she had come to do in so many things. The girl was always full of grand ideas. This Yannie approved of, on the whole. It formed a useful barrier between herself and real life, a phenomenon she still sought to avoid as much as possible.
*
Iceland has been great!! We were walking on this trail, looking for this waterhole that’s recommended by Lonely Planet, for swimming and stuff. But when we arrived, there were two people already in it – two naked old people, a man and a woman, I guess that they were a couple. And the woman was *really* old – at least seventy, I’m guessing – but she was swimming around and doing poses. Like, sexy poses. She was leaning back, putting her hands on her boobs, putting her arms above her head, and the man was photographing her. And then they saw us and were like (in Icelandic) ‘Come in! Come and join us!’ And we kind of went … NO … and pretended we had somewhere else to be. Which was ridiculous, because we were already in the middle of nowhere – there was literally nowhere else we could possibly have been going. Anyway, we just turned around and went back.
One evening, coming home from grocery shopping, Yannie stopped to check out some newly erected condominiums. The development, which had previously been called Prime Condominiums, had been renamed Summer Gardens – a ridiculous attempt at the poetic which made her laugh. What part of the complex, with its paved grounds and high steel gates, resembled a garden? Who in this part of the world kept a garden, anyway? Who could afford to, in this city? We like shopping centres, winning at exams, and food. And we live in the tropics – so why refer to ‘summer’, when that’s what it always is over here?
But still. The attempt was there. Yearning towards beauty, but not having the tools. Borrowing images from other people’s books, other people’s music. Other people’s art, mapped imperfectly onto lives which it wasn’t designed for.
We need words of our own, she thought. I’m tired of living in translation.
She borrowed books from the library: books on subjects she had not approached since high school, nor had any reason to. Medieval literature, quantum physics. But she found it hard to concentrate – her mind skated over the big ideas, retaining only scraps of value. I had a mind once – yes, I did. Before it rotted away from the inside. I still do, if you look carefully. Oh, but I don’t have much time, and anyone who achieves something special tends to do it while they’re still young. Physicists. Poets. Pop musicians.
She bought an anthology of poems, extremely thick and cheap because most of the work was out of copyright. A good selection, going right back to ye olde verses from the fifteen-hundreds. For whatever reason, though, the words refused to sing for her. They were so inert she felt mildly embarrassed on their behalf.
And all this time she was asking what she could do now, if there was something that would make it all worthwhile. I would like to make something, she thought – there’s no other work that’s worth the name. To bring something new into the world. But then, maybe it’s a relief to never get your chance. At least then you’ll never have to find out if you actually had any talent.
*
Stop feeding dreams
to this awful machine
of unrequited love –
*
You should not judge your parents. They did their best based on what they knew, which wasn’t very much. They were young, they were poor, they stuck themselves together using the money and the information they had access to at the time. You should not judge your parents.
Counterpoint: yes you fucking should. Because how hard was it to understand? The strong shouldn’t hurt the weak just because they can. Was this so difficult? How hard was it to fucking know?
*
What would it be like to gorge yourself on books, and have opinions, and just as much education as you wanted? What did they do with it, this surplus of attention, of energy, of mental latitude? What was it like to be rich?
Our grandparents had two concerns: calories and shelter. Our parents went a step beyond that and asked: are the children at school, and will they get good jobs? ‘Good’ meaning secure and well paid. Questions of fulfilment, autonomy, abstract concepts of societal value – she doubted whether any of these had ever crossed her father’s mind. Her mother would have laughed her out of the room if she’d ever brought it up. And a fat lot of good it did you: you’re both long gone, and I’m still here, and it’s turned out the opposite of how you wanted. It’s up to me to answer questions you never thought to ask.
There’s a time for poetry – it’s for the very young and very old. For when cause and effect don’t matter much anymore, and life is experienced in the form of a series of moments. In the prime of life, what you are looking for is narrative.
*
The narrator is part of the mechanics of the play, an act of open trickery. At times, she will be permitted to directly address the audience –
*
First of all I want knowledge; also time. Stumbling through life, seeing through a clouded mirror – I want to be young again, young in a way that I wasn’t even in my youth. To feel lust and be the object of lust - I want to make objects that are beautiful. They will not be me, though they will contain my essence. Not children – no, I’ve no regrets on that front, I’m not interested in ugly, degraded biology. I want to speak to everyone, people I’ve not met and never will; I refuse to accept this siege mentality, that inside of the family is light and outside is a tank of sharks. Fuck families. And when I say I want everything this includes Love but at full strength, not the discount version. Shared goals, shared compromises – I’ve never known another person like that and maybe it would be quite ennobling. But I have seen beneath the surface, this substratum of accepted disappointment, and I’ve been disappointed quite enough already in this life. What do I want? – feeling that detonates. I prefer a different kind of nuclear in my family. I will not have love which divides you from the world, measured not in what you can give but in what you are willing to give up. ‘Forsaking all others’ – I will forsake not one thing, not one form of pleasure nor of beauty. I will have it all, I will have everything this world can contain or else I will have nothing. And if nothing seems more plausible, so be it.
What was that song my mother used to sing? Let it be, let it be.
*
Shuying’s miraculous body, her magnificent haunches. Her gleaming aureole of hair against the sky. How can these things be consigned to memory only? Love. Love. Love.
*
It is possible to love a person, a place, a time, without wanting to remain there.
*
In the morning it was very bright and very hot. She woke up with the sun on her face and thought briefly about the UV before deciding not to worry about it. There wasn’t much damage it could do to her at this late stage. She turned her face to one side, and said, I have some capacity. I don’t know what it is yet, but the capacity for ideas is still inside. Mine will not be a life lived in economic dimensions only.
Yannie walked
slowly to the bathroom. She avoided looking at the mirror: there was a smudge of handprints on it, as if someone had tried to climb out through the glass. You haven’t seen the last of me, oh no. There is still some future left.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to:
Barry Scott and Tess Rice at Transit Lounge
Penelope Goodes for editorial wisdom
Bart James, David Ong and Peter Bishop for feedback at
various stages of the drafting process.
While writing this book I listened obsessively to a self-assembled soundtrack by the band Pulp, with whom I have no affiliation. The songs were:
I Spy
Pink Glove
Common People
Underwear
David’s Last Summer
Mile End
She’s a Lady
Cocaine Socialism
S. L. Lim was born in Singapore and moved to Sydney at the age of one. Her first novel Real Differences was published by Transit Lounge in 2019. She has appeared at literary festivals including Melbourne and Byron. An earlier version of Revenge was long listed for the 2017 Epigram Fiction Manuscript Prize.
