Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  She told the crude joke of a Priapus turned shrink, literally. (‘Have to explain that again to our Winnie the Blur!’)

  ‘He will have no shortage of women,’ said Winnie. ‘I take back what I said about his age. Few men in their fifties, look, oh my, oh my, so-ooh distinguished and sexy!’

  They would not be able to understand her reason. Perhaps she herself could not either. It probably had to do with the complicated business of calibrating that fine line of the crossing which kept shifting. The austere formality of ‘Dr Phang’ instead of the casual familiarity of ‘Ben’ or the surrendering endearment of ‘Dearest’ or ‘Darling’ helped in the calibration.

  Vanity, thy name is woman. For the modern thinking woman, the name had to be vanity plus caution plus self-preservation plus control plus a hundred unnamable drives, motives, instincts, intuitions and what women liked to call their astute sixth sense, forming a Gordian Knot impossible to untie into its numerous strands. Men liked to tell women that they were like the caterpillar with its countless legs; as long as the creature ignored them, it walked along smoothly and happily; as soon as it became conscious of them, it got itself all tangled up in a knot. Complexity, thy name is woman. Or simple confusion.

  ‘Why don’t you ever address me by my name?’ he asked.

  ‘Alright, I’ll call you Benjamin, if you like.’

  ‘You’re a very complex woman,’ he said, giving her nose a tweak. ‘You think too much. Too much cerebra, too little viscera.’

  She liked his pithy use of language, as he did hers.

  ‘Alright,’ he sighed, as they drove away. ‘Next time it has to be a warm room, with a silken bed.’ She liked it when he remembered all her fanciful expressions and used them when she least expected it.

  ‘Well, if we’re not going to do anything, you might tell me a story,’ he said. ‘I’m like a little boy all over again when I listen to your stories. You are my Sheherazade.’

  Maria said, ‘She nearly lost her life to the wicked sultan.’

  He said, ‘Nearly. But in the end, he married her because he could not do without her tales.’

  ‘Alright,’ said Maria, thinking that this man would never be in such a state of dependence on a woman. ‘I’ll tell you another one I’ve just made up about poor V.K. Pandy, but I warn you, it’s a silly story that will go someday into a book of children’s stories.’

  She had been inspired by that incident of Big Bird that day in Middleton Square, as well as a scathing comparison of V.K. Pandy, to a prancing circus monkey, in a newspaper some time back. In her story, a crowd of Singaporeans went all out to protect Big Bird from the police in a big chase which ended with the police catching their target, only to scratch their heads in bafflement as they at last caught their prey, pulled off the Big Bird costume and faced a real monkey turning its indecent, reddened backside to them.

  Dr Phang said, ‘I must remember to tell my daughter that story; she’ll love it.’ Then he said, ‘That man’s supporter will be allowed to go free this time, but not another time.’

  Did the protégé of the great TPK know much more than he was prepared to admit? Was he among the very few in the inner sanctum of trust who could put in a word for the much hated opposition dissident? What did it say of his magnanimity that in addition to secretly giving money to the much beleaguered V.K. Pandy, he was prepared to risk the prime minister’s displeasure on his account? For the great TPK was known to fall into an apoplexy of rage at the mere mention of that despised man.

  Maria wanted to ask: surely all this kindness towards V.K. Pandy has got nothing to do with high moral principles, because you have none? Dr Phang had instead what even the great TPK ultimately trusted more – a natural honesty born of the impulse to be happy and to bear goodwill towards the whole world.

  For the first time since they met, her heart ached to a fervent wish: if only. If only he were not a married man. If her mother had heard the wish, she would have cried out, ‘Ah, Maria, you’ve come to your senses at last! It’s immoral to go with a married man!’

  For many women, morality was suspended for the duration of an affair, and after the affair was over, could be brought back to give it closure: I did something wrong. I am sorry. I wasn’t thinking at the time. The conscience, in any case, was a pliable organ at the mercy of head and heart. Hers was exceptionally vulnerable in the presence of this extremely seductive Dr Phang who must have tamed his a long time ago. He had more than once hinted to her that if she wished, they could have occasional vacations abroad – in Europe, the United States, South America, South Africa – that would not be interrupted in any way. He was so enormously attractive to women precisely because he was so avowedly amoral.

  Twenty-Four

  The sudden departure of the principal of St Peter’s Secondary School provoked speculation which, for the time being at least, had to lie silent beneath the proper public response of polite acceptance of any decision taken by the Ministry of Education. The Ministry promoted deserving principals in secondary schools to senior school inspectors or administrative officers in the various departments of the ministry headquarters, or transferred them to larger, more prestigious schools and junior colleges. The sudden decision to let the principal of St Peter’s go on ‘indefinite leave’ was only slightly less foreboding than the decision of a ‘suspension’ which would mean that he was being investigated for some serious misdemeanour. What wrongdoing could the principal be possibly guilty of? He was an exemplar of professional and ethical conduct and had been so long at St Peter’s that he was simply known as ‘the principal’; many among the staff did not even know his full name. Besides, he had unfailingly shown support, expected of all school principals, for all government policies on education and gone beyond that to laud all other government decisions, whether on the promotion of marriage among eligible Singaporean singles or the punishment of those who chewed gum and stuck them on the seats of buses and trains. In political matters, he had been most enthusiastic in his prohibition of even the mention of V.K. Pandy in the classroom. All the newspaper cuttings of ministerial speeches put up on the school bulletin boards for the students’ edification could only confirm the ardour of his support. He was the ideal civil servant.

  It fell to the vice principal, a small, nondescript, hard-working man with a nervous twitch, to make the announcement to the whole school, which he did with great difficulty, confirming the suspicion that something serious must have taken place to plunge the poor principal into disgrace. What it was, nobody dared discuss openly; Maria noticed small groups of the staff huddled in urgent discussion from which she, the maverick teacher, was necessarily excluded.

  The vice principal, a week later, introduced the new principal, a Mr Ignatius Lim Song Kooi, who, without any reference to his predecessor, launched into a long speech about how he was determined to make St Peter’s one of the finest schools in Singapore. He had a bright smile for everyone, a hearty laugh and a readiness to talk about his rapid ascent up the ranks in his chosen career in education, which he spoke of fervently as a mission and a vocation. He spent his first day meeting the staff over coffee and cake and interviewing them individually afterwards, and the following days visiting every class in turn. Each visit began with a singing of the school song by the students standing up very straight, which he listened to very attentively, nodding amiably throughout. After he congratulated the students on their inspiring rendition of the song, he launched upon an enthusiastic lecture on living up to the high ideals of both the school song and motto. He made it clear that everyone was welcome to come to him with any problem, any time in his office.

  Maria thought, I’m going to miss the principal, realising with a start that for the first time in her many years in the school, she had heard his name mentioned in full: Augustine Tan Chee Kuan. She had a burning curiosity to find out the truth of his disgrace. That would come only after the task of regaining Maggie’s trust and finding the truth, probably heartbreaking, about her family circum
stances that could be destroying her. Her school programme was full, and for the first time, had nothing to do with exams but unhappy persons gone into silent, troubled retreat.

  Maria cast a glance around the students getting ready for the creative writing lesson, and was relieved to see Maggie sitting at the back, looking down resolutely, and Yen Ping and Mark two rows ahead. It would be the first time that Maggie’s story would be used for class discussion. The girl was proud and sensitive.Maria had spent considerable time working out an agreeable balance between the need to please her by, first, emphasising the creative elements in her story while suppressing the really awful ones, and second, by drawing attention to the worst clichés without embarrassing the poor girl who wrote and lived by them. She knew that Maggie, like a small quiveringly alert creature, would detect the remotest hint of condescension or patronage and rise to strike with her sharp responses.

  But no strategy of balancing could have out-manoeuvred Maggie’s purpose to shock everyone with her story. The outrageous tale was already outlined in the brazenly raw title ‘How Dirty Uncle Joe Lost his Bird’ and could not be read out to the class without extensive prior censorship and editing. Maggie had written, using incredibly crude imagery throughout, about a lecherous middle-aged man trying to seduce a pretty young girl who, at precisely the moment of danger, grabbed a pair of scissors and executed her bloody act, leaving Dirty Uncle doubled up in agony, his hands pressed on his now vacant crotch, hopping madly about and swearing. Of the half dozen words he used to describe her, ‘bitch’ might just be permitted in the reading out of the story. ‘You think this punishment enough?’ screamed the young girl. Of the numerous invectives she used, none was replicable in class. ‘You think I not suffer and suffer because you are so dirty and always try to touch me? Even when I asleep, even I take my bath, I have to watch for you, you dirty old man!’ ‘Oh no, oh no,’ screamed Dirty Uncle, as he saw her open the window and fling out his manhood, now no more than a tangle of bloody bits, like discarded offal on a butcher’s chopping block. He screamed even more when he heard loud quacking sounds outside the window. The girl looked out and watched four ducks fighting over the offering. She said smiling, ‘Good. Now you will not disturb me any more, you wicked, evil, sinful, dirty Uncle!’ Maggie must have built up her stock of stories from those she regularly heard from her mother and the other lounge waitresses, gathered together in their free time to drink and laugh at the men whom they would, after their brief respite, have to start pleasing all over again.

  Stripped of the lurid imagery, Maggie’s story was still stunning in the sheer daring of its theme and dialogue. Peals of laughter erupted in the classroom, in which Maria joined readily, at one point wiping the tears off her eyes. One of the students, a bright-eyed girl with long plaits, collapsed in a wash of merriment upon the back of the boy sitting in front of her; another, a mischievous-looking boy with a pimply face cried out ‘Dirty Uncle Bird! Dirty Uncle Bird!’, using a ruler to beat rhythmically upon his desktop.

  Maria was about to call a halt to the rowdiness and explain that saucy stories like Maggie’s were alright for the creative writing class but not for the G.C.E. O Level English Language paper when she saw Maggie look up with an expression of such concentrated fury that she stopped suddenly, said, ‘Maggie, wait –’ and the next moment rushed to stop the girl make a dash out of the classroom.

  She yelled, ‘Wait, Maggie, come back!’ but the girl was gone in a flash. Maria said, ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ and stood helplessly at the doorway, wondering what to do next. She returned dispiritedly to face the class, now quiet and looking at her for the next stage of action in the unfolding drama.

  One of the boys volunteered to go and look for Maggie. ‘Oh dear,’ Maria said, quite pale with the shock of the sudden turn of events. ‘We have upset Maggie. We shouldn’t have laughed so much. She must have thought we were making fun of her story.’

  ‘What about her making fun of our stories?’ said the bright-eyed girl with long plaits. ‘You remember when I read out my story, she kept giggling and making all sorts of comments?’

  ‘But it was such a funny story, Miss Seetoh!’ exclaimed the pimply boy. ‘I never laughed so much in my life!’ The laughter began again. Emboldened, the boy said, ‘Hey, Miss Seetoh, tell Maggie her story is good enough to be made into a movie! She’ll become very rich! That part about the ducks gobbling it up – ha, ha, ha!’

  Maria said, ‘Be quiet,’ then looked at Yen Ping and Mark who had remained silent throughout; they seemed to have withdrawn into themselves, not self-consciously as the school’s most celebrated pair but gravely as if that position was bringing its own insurmountable problems.

  As soon as she was free, Maria went in search of Maggie. She was nowhere to be found. In the canteen, Auntie Noodles said that Maggie had picked up her sister and they had both gone off, without their usual meal of noodles.

  ‘Did she look upset?’ asked Maria anxiously.

  ‘She was crying,’ said Auntie Noodles.

  ‘Did she say anything to you?’ asked Maria and dreaded to hear the answer, ‘She said Miss Maria Seetoh made fun of her and her beloved sister Angel.’

  Maggie did not come to school the following day, nor the day after. After a week, Maria, sick with remorse and worry, went to Brother Philip for help and advice. She was met with the worst possible news. Maggie had left the school, with no intention of returning.

  Brother Philip showed her the letter addressed to him: ‘I Maggie Sim Pek Ngoh, am no longer student of St Peter’s Secondary School, because it is stinking school. The principal, the teachers, the students – they all stink. Miss Maria Seetoh, she stink most of all!’ Maria burst into tears.

  ‘I really want to see her again, to explain everything. She misunderstood me so badly.’

  Brother Philip offered to drive her to Maggie’s home to do the explanation. He said he would be wearing shirt and pants, not his robe, to avoid attention.

  The school administrative officer gave them Maggie’s address from a register, saying, ‘This may not be the correct address. She changed it three times.’ Some months back, when a school counsellor went to the last given address, she was told by a middle-aged couple there that they were Maggie’s relatives, with little connection with the girl or her family. The couple mentioned The Blue Moon Lounge in an infamous part of the town where Maggie’s mother worked.

  ‘That’s where we’ll go next,’ said Maria with determination. ‘Dear Brother Phil, I’m sorry to involve you in all this mess. But I simply have to find Maggie.’

  Mrs Neo and Teresa Pang were already heaving sighs of relief. Good riddance to bad rubbish. They added that if that troublesome girl had not left on her own, the new principal would make her, for he was clearly a man of action who would not tolerate a fraction of the nonsense that the old principal did.

  The search was fruitless. Nobody at the Blue Moon Lounge had heard of a woman with the surname Sim or with daughters named Maggie and Angel. Or they were co-operating with her and Maggie not to reveal anything.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ said Brother Philip soothingly. He offered her a large white handkerchief which he took out of his pocket. She continued to sob convulsively.

  All, all gone wrong in her world, when she had only meant to be kind. But it all boiled down to her insensitivity. How could she have not noticed Maggie’s distress?

  Brother Philip drew her gently into his arms and patted her back. ‘You’re alright,’ he said. Soon she stopped crying and continued to lie in the comforting protection of his arms, a safe warm spot in a horrible world. You’re okay. You’re alright. All her life, she needed men to tell her that.

  Brother Philip was one of the very few at St Peter’s who could tell her about the situation regarding the principal. He was being investigated by the Ministry of Education following a complaint, in an anonymous letter, about unprofessional, unethical conduct: he had awarded the contract for the building of an extension of the school library to a c
ontractor without the proper procedures laid down by the Ministry; the contractor turned out to be his brother-in-law. Now disgraced, he spent all his time at home and would likely lose his principal’s position even if he were allowed back into education; if found guilty of corruption, he could even be sent to jail, for corruption among civil servants, said the great TPK, was the beginning of rot in a society and would never be tolerated. Singaporeans remembered that years back a junior minister had been charged with accepting the bribe of a free vacation to Indonesia for his whole family plus an Italian leather armchair, and had, during the period of suspension, committed suicide by hanging himself.

  Maria thought, poor principal. I’ll miss him. She asked Brother Philip if he had seen him since. ‘Once,’ he replied, ‘he looked much thinner. He looked sad and subdued. He did not welcome visitors.’

  ‘Do you think the charges are true?’ asked Maria.

  ‘Who knows?’ shrugged Brother Philip.

  Maria thought that the last person she would link with her greedy, money-desperate brother was the principal of St Peter’s Secondary school. Venality, corruption, sordidness – from the great murky ocean outside, they washed up on the shores of an institution dedicated to learning and noble ideals.

  Also heartlessness and cruelty towards young love. Yen Ping and Mark asked to see her privately. They met in a corner of the school library after school. Each looked nervously to the other to begin confiding their troubled story. It seemed that Mark’s mother had found out that they were serious about each other and had immediately stormed into the school to complain to the principal. Maria could imagine the woman, insufferably loud and arrogant, with her heavy make-up, perfectly coiffured hair and designer clothes, standing before Mr Ignatius Lim, waving her manicured hands about, dropping hints that she was the niece of the Deputy Minister of Trade and Business, disdaining to refer to her son’s girlfriend’s parents other than as working class people with whom she had nothing in common. ‘I have plans for Mark to go abroad and study in the best university,’ she said, ‘and I would like you as the principal to see to it that there is no more nonsense going on!’ Before she left, she opened her handbag, took out her chequebook and made a donation to the school charity fund, saying with a smile that St Peter’s could always count on her support. As soon as she left, Mr Lim sent for Mark and Yen Ping and reminded them that no pairing was allowed in schools. ‘I will be keeping an eye on you,’ he said with a great show of geniality. ‘Any more complaints and I might have to do something drastic. You strike me as very sensible young people. So stop being naughty and concentrate on your studies!’