Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  Her mother and Heng came up to her and pulled her aside, saying in urgent, lowered voices, that they had to speak to her on a very important matter. The looks of intense discomfort and anxiety on their faces, presaging bad news so bad it could not wait, sent little tremors all over her body. She was convinced it had to do with her husband. She thought: he has suffered much; please don’t let anything disturb his peace.

  It would appear that he was determined to disturb hers. Apparently, he had made two decisions just before his death, without her knowledge, both reflecting a rage that would not die with the body. The first was reported by Heng, the second by her mother.

  ‘Just what was going on between you that he had to do this?’ demanded her brother in a mixture of shock, anger and disgust. The disgust was directed mainly at the new beneficiary in her husband’s will: he had got his lawyer to change it a few days before his death, naming his Third Aunt in place of his wife.

  ‘The apartment is now at least thirty per cent more than when he bought it,’ Heng said, his face taut with incredulity. ‘Why would he suddenly want his aunt to have it? She’s in her seventies, living in Malaysia. Her horde of relatives will all be clamouring to have a share of it.’ His anger was that of a family member needing to protect his own against a greedy world.

  Her mother looked at her with a mixture of sorrow and vexation. ‘Maria,’ she said tearfully, ‘what will people say?’

  Her brother asked her again in mounting exasperation, ‘What on earth had you done to make him do such a drastic thing? I’ve never heard of such a thing.’

  She replied with cool hauteur, suddenly incensed against him, her mother, everybody, the living and the dead. ‘It’s none of your business, Heng.’

  Almost tempted to say, in a surge of spite, ‘Why don’t you mind your own business and take care of your poor wife and son?’, she calmed herself with a decisive defence of her husband, ‘Listen, both of you. Bernard was free to do exactly as he liked with whatever he possessed.’

  Outwardly defending his action, she tried to curb the inner tumult that left her trembling: ‘Bernard, if you can hear my thoughts now, was it necessary to go so far in your revenge? But you are achieving the purpose you intended; you have thoroughly poisoned my family against me.’

  Her mother pushed a sheet of paper at her, on which something had been written. She recognised her husband’s handwriting, though it was a weak scrawl. ‘Ah Siong really loved you,’ Anna Seetoh whimpered. ‘This proves it. How could you?’ She must have been thinking of that treacherous embrace outside the sickroom.

  There was something frightfully unreal about the self-composed obituary that he had scrawled and instructed his mother-in-law and brother-in-law to insert in The Singapore Tribune: it was cast in the form of a grieving wife’s tribute to her husband, affirming love, remembrance and yearning for all eternity. Loved eternally by your ever devoted wife, Maria. Dearest Bernard, in my heart forever. The extravagance of love was no less obscene than if it had been a discharge of purest hatred. Her husband had in effect forced upon her a public avowal of love that was a savage mockery of its absence in their marriage. For ten years, according to his instructions, it would appear, on the anniversary of his death, in Singapore’s leading newspaper. For ten years, she would look upon the photograph of her husband, smiling gently, and below it, the breathless proclamations of her love and loyalty, and be thus reminded of what a terrible failure she had been. He had left Heng a substantial sum of money to take care of the cost of the quarter page insertion, big enough to attract the attention of even the casual newspaper browser. How was it possible that a dying man’s last energies, despite the exhortations of his priest to prepare his soul to meet his God in the next world, could be so entirely devoted to the planning of a revenge to take place exclusively in this one?

  With rising anger, she suspected a more sinister intention: if, during the ten-year period of public professions of undying devotion, she was seen with another man, or married or had an affair, she would forever stand condemned for hypocrisy of the worst kind. The Black Widow. The Blackest Widow. If he was no longer around to point an accusing finger at her, let others do it on his behalf. She thought that revenge of this extreme kind which reached beyond the grave existed only in dramatic, sensationalist literature and movies; now she, Maria Seetoh, most ordinary of mortals, school teacher and aspiring writer, who only wanted to be happy in life and do no harm to others, was being touched by the deadliest of dead hands. If fact overtook fiction, her own life story would be in the realm of the fantastical.

  She managed to retrieve the letter from the coffin and return it to its place beside the dead man after adding a post-script:

  ‘Dear Bernard, thank you for not letting me have the property, since to benefit in any way from your tragic death would have brought guilt to my new life. Guilt there will be, in proportion to the happiness and freedom I know I will be enjoying, but it should be just that much and no more. Besides, I couldn’t bear to continue to live in a place that holds such sad memories. As for the remembrance notices over the next ten years, they will be just ten years’ worth of falsehood in which, thankfully, I have had no part. You have upset me so much, Bernard, that you will allow me my own kind of revenge, though I wouldn’t use that word. From now onwards I will not want to be known as Mrs Tan Boon Siong.’

  Nineteen

  What a lovely sight, she thought, my eyes could feast on it forever. From her bench in the shade of a tree, one of those lovely ones in the Botanic Gardens that not only provided shade but a delightful, soothing scent from its clusters of tiny white flowers amid a riot of the greenest of green leaves, she watched the children by the fish pond, absorbed in the various delights provided by a large body of water teeming with hungry fish unafraid to swim right up to the edge, right up to their small fingers holding out bread crumbs, their little outstretched bodies held tightly by smiling parents. A young woman wheeling a pram stopped close by the water’s edge to allow the infant who had just awakened from his nap, to look upon the lively scene, which he did with gurgling interest.

  A little girl who was clutching a plastic bag of biscuit crumbs was squealing with delight for having spotted a turtle among the fish; a little boy of about four with a thin serious face was giving the correct answers to an over-earnest mother turning the entire Botanic Gardens into a classroom: ‘What is that, Kevin?

  ‘A fish.’

  ‘What’s that, out there, look!’

  ‘A duck.’

  ‘Spell ‘duck’.

  ‘D-U-C-K.’

  ‘Look up there, on the tree branch. What’s that?’

  ‘Butterfly.’

  ‘Butterflies. So many of them. Clever boy!’

  A sparrow hopped very close to her feet, pecking at something on the ground. Another joined it, then a third. She watched them with interest, wondering at their very thin legs and tiny feet, like matchsticks that would never snap, but could be depended on to carry them through any harshness of weather in their briefly appointed existence on the earth. The lovely, slender may-fly with its beautiful transparent wings lived exactly twenty-four hours, during which it was born, matured, mated, gave birth and died. How long did a sparrow live? There must be something special about these birds to be singled out for mention in the divine lecture admonishing those who worried unnecessarily: Divine Providence took care of all living things, including these humblest of birds, for not a single one of them fell to its death without divine knowledge.

  Here in the Botanic Gardens, Providence had appointed little children, with their generous bags of crumbs, to be its assistants to make sure its precious sparrows never fell dead from starvation. ‘Providence’, like ‘God’, capitalised, but with the relative pronoun ‘it’ in lower case, unlike the towering male supremacy of ‘His’. Ever since she stopped going to church, she had been content to think in terms of abstract nouns – Providence, Power, Force, Energy, Source, Being, indeed, anything, as long as it was va
gue enough for that unknown entity out there, or in here, that was nowhere and everywhere. She did not want it to have a gender, an ethnicity, a home country, a face, a voice, a personality, for that had caused all the trouble in the world. Someone had once said that those who abandoned God were left with a God-shaped hole that nothing could fill. Hers was being richly filled with all manner of things that did not even have names.

  She made a slight movement with her feet, but the birds went on pecking, unperturbed. There were now four of them, and she wondered whether they were a family, the two smaller-sized ones being nestlings taken out for their first lesson in independent foraging. Her eyes caught sight, a short distance away, of a group of three sparrows furiously tearing away at something on the ground that looked like a dead lizard. She looked closer: oh no, it was a dead bird. One of the sparrows was ferociously pulling out, through a mess of feathers, an intestine that looked like a very long worm. Those divinely favoured creatures were cannibalising their own. She moved to another bench, determined to see nature only at her benign best, not savagely red in tooth and claw.

  A skinny brown squirrel appeared from somewhere, scurried to a spot under her bench and made off with something, probably a nut, or a bit of a child’s biscuit. She looked up into the sky and saw a huge flock of white birds, their bodies moving in perfect group synchronisation like a single playful organism that changed rapidly from one shape into another, now stretched out into a row of pennants streaming in the wind, like the beard of an awesome warrior god riding out to battle, now gathered into itself to look like the round-headed friendly ghost with a tail, seen in comic books. That too dissolved, in a matter of seconds, to form – surely it was her vanity that was distorting her vision! – the letter M. Her name writ large in the sky, if only for one fleeting second.

  It had been her vanity, right from childhood, to believe that when she cried, nature shed tears too, sending down, if not a torrent, at least a tiny drizzle. A fallacy by no means pathetic, it had become part of a dependable comfort kit in her long hours of solitude. Rain, sun, sky, cloud, grass, the birds of the air and the lilies in the field – she had co-opted them all for her own safe, happy world. Stare hard enough at the clouds, she was told as a child, and they will form any picture you like. She only looked out for letter formations of her name; if there were none, she created them, needing only small lengths of white cloud to work with, like pliable plasticine, to shape into any letter of her full name. ‘Look!’ she would tell her mother or Por Por. ‘That’s my name in the sky!’

  As a child, she had had her birthday celebrated only once. Her mother had bought a cake and iced her name on it. She was so thrilled she could not bear the cake knife to break up the five pink letters arranged in a rainbow curve. In the end her mother sliced off the whole top portion of the cake for her, to keep the name intact. She wondered how she could bear to spoon up her name and eat it. Could she keep them in a box forever?

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said her mother laughing.

  Then her brother Heng stole up from behind her with a large tin spoon and plunged it right into the middle of her name. She screamed. Her mother did nothing to punish the culprit; Anna Seetoh’s constant anxiety about what people would think of her had invested the adopted child’s position with special privileges. Heng always got away with the naughtiness and later, the viciousness of boyhood pranks, laughing to see all the scolding, pinching and slapping directed elsewhere. When he made further devastation of her name on the cake, she rose in full fury. While she had submitted to his hair-pulling and arm-smacking, his raiding of her small store of coloured pencils and coins in her coconut-shell money-box, she could not let him get away with the mutilation of her name. She chased him with such fury that he ran away in fright; when she caught him, she smashed a surprisingly strong fist into his face. He ran howling to Anna Seetoh who subsequently calmed him down with a fistful of coins.

  From that day on, he never bullied her again. Her mother would never tell her why she had adopted him, why he had had very little share in the family’s privations as they moved from place to place to escape the loan sharks, but stayed comfortably with his biological mother whom he called ‘Auntie’. Years later, when she reminded him of the incident of the cake, he feigned a forgetfulness not consistent with the bribe of money.

  She looked at the giant gnarled trees towering skywards, that had existed in brooding silence for hundreds of years before they became part of a garden constructed for the pleasure of a tired city; in them surely resided a pantheon of deities that had never left their abodes in nature for the man-made churches, temples and shrines of the city. Here in this loveliest, most peaceful spot in her world, the feathered, furred and finned denizens of nature came up, unafraid, to be fed and stroked by children.

  She got up from the bench and walked to a nearby gentle slope where she lay on the grass, stretching out her arms and legs to luxuriate fully in its warmth and scent, a solitary mortal on the face of the earth, at one with all the life nourished by it and nourishing it, animal, vegetable, human, divine, and who knows, also the tiniest of tiny specks of life in a universe so vast that Earth would have perished and returned to primordial dust by the time it was visited by a sister planet separated by breathlessly unimaginable light years. A small grasshopper flew into her hair and got entangled in the long strands spread out on the grass. The more it struggled to escape, the more deadly became the trap; she sat up and carefully freed it, hair by hair.

  ‘Foolish thing!’ she laughed, and cast it back into the air.

  A wedding group was busily posing for pictures under a large tree. The bride’s long white dress with a full skirt and her long veil of net, held by a diamante tiara, were being carefully arranged for the camera by her two bridesmaids, both dressed in pale pink. The bride carried a bouquet of yellow and white orchids, smiling gamely in the heat under her thick make-up that was being constantly repaired by a powder puff held by a middle-aged woman in a cheongsam, whose own make-up looked very much in need of repair. The bridegroom in a smart grey suit and red tie was smiling broadly throughout, and readily acceded to a demand yelled out by one of the watching guests, ‘Kiss, kiss!’ for the last of three different bridal poses for the cameraman; to loud applause, he clumsily turned his bride around, pushed aside her veil, and planted a quick kiss on her lips.

  Giddy with happiness and new mischief as she sat on her bench watching them, she could have cupped her hand and shouted out to the newly married pair, ‘Hey, I offer my condolences!’

  If they had shouted back angrily, ‘You, sour grapes, you!’, she would have joyfully told them her story, like the man in the myth who, when he was forbidden to tell his secret, ran out to a field of corn and whispered it to them, thereafter investing them with ears.

  The Botanic Gardens was clearly an even more popular place for trysting couples who might or might not end up marrying; on her way to the fish pond, she had passed several of them in secluded spots in the various poses of happy love, from the shy tentativeness of hand-holding to the aggressive demonstrations of full-blown passion checked only by the law’s prohibition against public disrobing. One very young-looking couple, probably students, had dispensed altogether with discretion; they were nestled, fully clothed, against each other on the top of a grassy slope, and then, locked tightly together, rolled down the slope, laughing all the way.

  Oh, how happy I am, she thought, and realised she had not used that word in the present tense for a long while. I was happy. I will be happy. She wanted to summon the entire romancing, loving, lusting, marrying population of the Botanic Gardens to come before her for a lecture: Are you sure it’s love? Otherwise, don’t! For goodness’ sake, don’t!

  The book on her lap lay unread; she was content to watch the people around her, their faces temporarily cleared of all the stresses of negotiating life one day at a time in a city increasingly stressful, as they took in long draughts of the invigorating air and broke into smiles at the antics of the
little ones around them, wrestling with each other on the grass, rummaging picnic baskets, running after their hoops and balls.

  A little boy of about three stopped before her, uncertain about how to rescue his bright red ball that had rolled under her bench. He stood before her, a forefinger inside his mouth, looking intently at her. She bent to retrieve the ball, then smilingly handed it to him.

  It must have been her bright, encouraging smile that inspired the little fellow to launch upon his own initiative of friendly self-introduction.

  ‘My name’s Randal,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a blue boat. And Spiderman.’

  She was delighted. ‘My name’s Maria,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a boat or Spiderman, but lots of books. You like books, Randal?’

  But Randal’s interest had taken a different turn. He took her hand and led her up a grassy slope, to where a woman was sitting on a bright mat surrounded by an assortment of picnic cups, plates and boxes.

  ‘Oh there you are, Randal,’ she said. To Maria, she said smiling, ‘I hope my boy hasn’t been bothering you?’ It was part of the continuing delight of the encounter that she accepted the invitation from the friendly woman to sit down for a sandwich and a drink of juice.

  The delight climaxed in the most unexpected way. As she was walking back to her bench, she saw, some distance ahead, Randal emerging from behind a clump of trees. Surely that was not possible! A little boy with the supernatural power of bilocation, who could simply appear and disappear at different spots as he chose? A child’s ghost, or more accurately, a doppelganger, in a popular recreational spot even before daylight had gone? She had heard tales of the ghosts of Japanese soldiers seen wandering in the gardens, more than half a century after the war, recognisable by their distinct uniforms and caps.

  She stared, then realised, with a smile, how unnecessary had been those wild conjectures, as soon as she saw a woman emerge from behind the trees to say to the child, ‘Ryan, you feel okay now?’ and adjust his shirt and pants.