Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  I have a headache coming, thought Maria, the headaches being an excuse to get away from too much thinking.

  She was glad that only heart needed to be engaged in the following days. She and the maid went on a shopping trip to one of the large departmental stores with a section well-stocked with costume jewellery, and came back with very convincing-looking jade earrings, bangles and gold chains. Por Por laughed with happiness as they put the various items on her, and stood before a mirror, admiring herself like a vain child decked out for a party. In her quavering voice, she sang a song in the dialect of the village of her childhood in China, making delicate movements with her hands and fingers. Anna Seetoh gave practical advice, with the same sad expression as when she had received the devastating confession of her adopted son’s gambling debts: Por Por must not be allowed out on her own. The bad people out there would mistake all that worthless stuff for the real thing. Anna Seetoh left unsaid a bitter thought: she did not want to have one more family disaster to cope with. Why was the Holy Virgin Mary not answering her prayers?

  She woke up at five every morning to be in time for the early morning mass in the Church of Eternal Mercy, remaining on her knees throughout the one hour of the service, praying for her son, her daughter, her mother. She prayed to her late son-in-law, believing him to have served his purgatory and gone to heaven where he was in a position to help his loved ones on earth, among whom, in his new saintly state, he must include even his sinful wife.

  ‘No, there’s no need to accompany me,’ said Anna Seetoh brusquely to her daughter, adding, ‘what’s the use. You stopped believing long ago.’

  ‘I told you, Mother,’ said Maria patiently, ‘it’s bad weather this morning, and it’s a school holiday. Besides, it’s your birthday, and after mass, we can go for breakfast to Tai Kee Restaurant for your favourite pork porridge.’

  Anna Seetoh was about to say No again when a thought suddenly occurred to her which made her say instead, ‘Alright, if you wish.’

  This could be the Holy Mother’s answer to her prayer to bring back the prodigal daughter, or at least a prelude to the answer. She said, ‘Suppose Father Rozario thinks you’ve come back; suppose your godma and the others ask. What shall I tell them?’

  ‘Anything you like,’ said Maria cheerfully, ‘but this morning you’re going to have the best birthday breakfast!’

  The last time she was at a service in the Church of Eternal Mercy, her heart was heaving to the tumult of a hundred conflicting emotions as she looked upon her husband’s coffin and joined in the prayers for the repose for his soul. Now it was muted in its joy only by the surrounding sombreness of the small early morning congregation, still sleepy-faced, comprising mainly the middle-aged and the elderly bent over their prayer books, responding to the priest in low murmurs.

  Her own prayer could not come from any book, only from a heart determined to be kind: God, if you really exist as everyone believes you do, could you do something for Mrs V.K. Pandy? Also Maggie and Angel. Maybe even Mrs TPK. For it was said that the prime minister’s wife was suffering from some strange illness or combination of illnesses that Singapore’s doctors seemed unable to cure. Maria thought, what an irony that all the money, all the best medical help at her husband’s disposal – it was said he had brought in top medical consultants from London – could not help her. She was seldom seen outdoors; Winnie had once seen her in a departmental store, accompanied by two maids, at the furniture section, buying some bolsters, looking too old, bent and fragile for her age. She was said to be a very good, kind woman, as compassionate as her husband was ruthless. Dear God, if it is true that you care for every one of your creatures, you must help poor Mother, and Brother Heng and Por Por and the maid Rosiah who says her husband is squandering all her hard-earned money on a woman who is using black magic on him. Maria then remembered Rosiah’s sister, living in a small village in Indonesia, whose woodcutter husband had died from a fall, leaving her with four young children. And a fellow maid Rosiah had told her about who was very unhappy working for an abusive employer but had no choice but to stay, being in debt to the agent who had brought her to Singapore.

  Her heart went further afield to embrace a man whose plight she had read about in the papers – a villager from Pakistan who had come illegally to Singapore to work as a construction worker after selling his farm, and had been brutally exploited by his employer; when he was seriously injured at work, the employer, on the pretext of taking him to a doctor, drove him to a deserted area and threw him into a ditch where, fortunately, his feeble cries for help were heard by someone who happened to be passing by. Her heart, now fully launched on its journey of connection with fellow human beings, wandered even further to ask God’s help for the survivors of a cyclone in the Philippines, the grieving families of a coal mine disaster in China, children on the brink of starvation in a war-torn African state, their skeletal legs hardly able to support their bloated bellies covered with flies, the victims of a savage mass shooting in Washington that wiped out a family of five, including a baby of ten months.

  All this while, her head remained silent, holding back thoughts that might disrupt the heart’s free roaming. God, if you exist. If you are truly a Creator worshipped by his creatures as all powerful, all good, all loving. If you are the someone in the great somewhere, celebrated in those hymns of yearning, who hears every word. Why, why, why? In the drowsiness induced by Father Rozario’s monotonous chanting and the billows of incense smoke coming from his censer, all the large existential questions disappeared into her own ridiculously trivial one: should she, or should she not go to bed with Dr Phang? She felt too sleepy to answer the question and surrendered herself to the overpowering soporific effect, as to a narcotic, of the morning gloom and chill inside the Church of Eternal Mercy. She was having a strange little dream in which she was standing in some desolate-looking school compound, surrounded by naked, flag-waving children, when she woke up suddenly to the sensation of a sharp nudge in her side and an abrupt jerk of her head. She opened her eyes to see an amused smile on her mother’s face, which made her smile too.

  She had to work hard to make Maggie smile again. The day before the appointed lunch at her place – Anna Seetoh had kindly offered to fry noodles and bake a cake for dessert – she saw an envelope addressed to her, laid on her teacher’s record book, and pulled out a note saying ‘Miss Seetoh, owing to unforesee circumstance, I am not able to have lunch with you this Saturday. Please accept very sincere apology from me. Maggie.’

  There was no mention of the story she was submitting for the creative writing class, in a separate envelope, written on three sheets of paper, also laid on the record book. At a glance, Maria could see it was one of those hopelessly atrocious love-and-sex stories that seemed to be Maggie’s staple; as she put it back into the envelope she was determined to put it to good use in the next creative writing lesson, when she would remember to assign only second place to Yen Ping. The two girls were still avoiding each other, Maggie with a toss of her head, Yen Pin with her eyes on the ground.

  She saw Maggie in the canteen, again with her sister Angel, again eating at Auntie Noodles’ table, and said, ‘Maggie, I hope you will be around next Thursday, we’re going to have an interesting class discussion,’ but the girl only smiled faintly and looked away.

  Maria was almost envious of Auntie Noodles for being the only one in the entire world of St Peter’s Secondary School whom Maggie would talk to. Brother Philip had said that when he asked her to his office and tried to get her to talk to him, she looked straight ahead all the while, as impassive as a statue.

  Maria said, ‘Brother Phil, thank you for telling me about the rivalry with Yen Ping. To think I could have been so blind all along.’

  Brother Philip said, ‘So despite her campaign of resistance, she’s given you a story. It must mean something.’

  Maria sighed, ‘Totally horrible. On a subject I wouldn’t tell you about, dear Brother Phil, because it would make you blus
h. And written in the worst clichés. But I think I understand Maggie better now.’ It was her last hope to restore the girl’s mood. Perhaps then she would open up and allow her teachers to help her and her sister.

  They were in his car parked in a deserted area outside the Botanic Gardens. It was the first time they had met in the evening; the question as to whether Olivia Phang was away on one of her visits back home to Hong Kong could not be asked. She thought, with some amusement, about the classic ‘one-thing-led-to-another’ explanation that men and women gave for the best intentions gone awry, when lurking passion, beginning with something as innocuous as a sip of wine together, a smile, a sharing of a joke, could escalate into the breathless rush into the bedroom. But men and women were ever disingenuous about that first one thing that had led to all the others: the choice of a venue away from all prying eyes.

  Here they were, in a car, in a dark isolated area marked by tall trees and bushes, with nobody in sight except other parked cars at discreet distances, all united in a delicious conspiracy of amatory intent. It had begun with a dinner in an obscure café outside town.

  ‘A ride?’ he had suggested, ‘If you like,’ she had said, with no idea where he was going. It was amazing how much of their exploration of each other’s intentions and sensitivities were in casual, crisp monosyllables.

  When she was thirteen, she went on a church outing by the sea and one of the picnickers, a good-looking boy of sixteen, had issued an invitation of a vaguely clandestine nature. He said, pointing to a cluster of rocks a short distance from shore, ‘There are interesting shellfish to pick there. Would you like to come with me?’ The boy spent at least ten minutes searching for non-existent shellfish, all the while holding her hand tightly, but he had accomplished his purpose of being alone with the prettiest girl in the picnic group, and she had experienced a special thrill in stealing away from her mother’s side for a secret rendezvous. Now, thirty years later, she was feeling something of that girlish sense of adventure.

  It was a situation that was bringing her closer to the line which she knew she would be crossing at her peril, but how many women had not succumbed to the thrill of a peril? One thing led to another. Before I knew it. It all happened so fast. I really didn’t know what I was doing. Women would afterwards wonder at how easily they gave in and learn that passion had its own unstoppable momentum. Now she understood why the nuns in the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus where she had her education, and the Christian brothers in the boys’ school just next to the convent, were always warning their respective charges: stay away from temptation. Better still, stay away from the occasion for temptation.

  Their occasion, in a locked car in a dark isolated spot, completely safe from a prying world, was replete with both promise and peril. The line to be crossed had become an edge on which she was standing and looking down tremblingly into an abyss. For Dr Phang, there was no tremor, only the sense of an exhilarating free fall. He was as far removed from those loud, uncouth males boasting of their conquests in bars and locker rooms, as an Ariel playing a romantic tune on a harp was removed from a slouching, slobbering Caliban. While having his morning shave or combing that handsome head of hair in front of the mirror, he might just pause for a while, look hard at himself and allow a quick self-congratulatory smile outside the range of his wife’s detecting eyes. For him the mirror moment of honesty had only to do with keeping faith with life’s instincts for pleasure and joy.

  He was all for making use of the stolen moments to do what the open daytime meetings at the restaurants and coffee-houses forbade. He said, wrapping her in his arms as soon as they were parked and had only the faint light of a few stars in the sky to show the outlines of their faces, ‘What’s with that pensive look?’ If she insisted on asking irksome questions, he was ready with a quick answer about Olivia being away in Malaysia and returning in two days. There was clearly something troubling her, and he sat back and prepared to listen, a firm hand on her thigh.

  ‘Today’s the first anniversary of Bernard’s death,’ she said. ‘Did you look at the obituary pages of The Straits Tribune this morning?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ he replied. She could see him over his morning coffee reading the words under Bernard’s photo in the ‘In Memoriam’ notice, exactly as Bernard had dictated them to Heng on his deathbed: Loved eternally. Forever in my heart. Your beloved wife, Maria. Words of love and devotion, in a scheme of revenge that would work itself out over the next ten years.

  She had the same urge to correct the falsehood now, as she had been intent almost four years ago, when they had all met on their honeymoon in the Cameron Highlands, to do away with the false impression that Dr Phang might have had about her marrying on account of a twenty-thousand-dollar diamond ring. A cheap woman, a lying woman – that impression of her by anyone, let alone that man – would have been intolerable to her pride.

  She told him the ghastly truth about those words of undying devotion announced to the world, and realised, with dismay, that she would have to repeat the tiresome explanation to Meeta and Winnie who would by now have seen the notice and could already have left their shocked inquiries in the voice mail of her phone. To no one would she reveal the new truth, something to which she had responded first with disgust and then with relief, that there would be no more of the remaining nine commemorations enjoined by Bernard, for Heng had spent all the given money on his gambling.

  When her mother told her, she had merely replied, ‘Tell him to sell the niche next to Bernard’s, if he likes. I have no use for it.’

  In the last month of his illness, Bernard had bought two niches in the columbarium next to the Church of Eternal Mercy, the second one presumably for her.

  ‘Today’s his anniversary. Aren’t you going to pay your respects at the columbarium?’ Anna Seetoh said. ‘At least go with some flowers.’

  Maria knew that her mother had just returned home from an anniversary mass for Bernard. She said, attempting a smile, ‘I think I might as well keep my ‘lost sheep’ status all the way.’

  Her mother had told her that in one of his sermons on lost sheep, Father Rozario had specifically mentioned her. The good priest and the entire congregation of the Church of Eternal Mercy could have any ill impression of her; she would make sure that Dr Phang did not.

  ‘Yes, it was rather odd, but I guessed,’ he said briefly. ‘Bernard was incapable of any straight thinking at that time.’

  Then apparently glad to have disposed of the talking, he resumed the passion, pulling her to him and nuzzling her with anticipatory eagerness. His passion had no need of the soft enveloping darkness, the heavy scent of night flowers, the gentle hum of small insects, nor the suggestive low moans coming from some of the other parked cars. He was kissing her ardently and the hand that had been caressing her neck moved down slowly, tentatively, checking for the slightest sign of resistance. For under no circumstances would the gallant man force himself on a woman.

  ‘Well, it’s not my night,’ he said with a sigh of resignation as she suddenly broke free of his arms with a start and a small scream. She had heard some rustling sounds in a nearby bush and caught sight of a moving shadow with a tiny flicker of light that moved with it. There would always be the annoying Peeping Toms prowling around lovers’ haunts with their furtive torchlights; she had once read about a sick voyeur who charged into a parked car and dragged out the couple, injuring the man with a knife and attempting to rape the girl.

  Their evening was over, and they tried to make light of it. Maria said, ‘You don’t want the papers tomorrow to carry this headline, do you: ‘Dr Benjamin Phang, protégé of the great TPK, caught naked in car with teacher from St Peter’s Secondary School!’

  He said, ‘Come to think of it, you’ve never called me by my name.’

  He was ‘Dr Phang’ officially, ‘Benjamin’ to his colleagues, ‘Ben’ to close friends, ‘Benjy’ or ‘Darling Benjy Boy’ to Olivia, in a rapidly ascending scale of intimacy. Whatever her present relationship
to him, the address should, at the least, have been somewhere between the formality and the intimacy. Meeta, according to Winnie who liked to listen at her door or peep through the keyhole, was addressing the holy god-man Sai Baba as ‘Dearest Baba’ and ‘Darling Baba’ while waiting to use the endearments on mortals. Winnie herself used all manner of pet names for the many men who came into her life, which became abusive nicknames as soon as they got out of it.

  ‘Isn’t it odd that you’re still referring to him as Dr Phang?’ said Meeta.

  ‘Even after you’ve slept with him?’ giggled Winnie.

  She had shared her secret with them for no other reason than that they had always shared theirs with her. Women were a sorority of incorrigible secret sharers. But she was getting a little tired of their company, their peevishness and querulousness, and beginning to decline the invitations to dine with them at the Polo Club.

  ‘For goodness’ sake,’ said Meeta. ‘Stop all this playing hard to get! Your dream man will get tired of waiting and leave you for another less difficult woman.’