by May Seah
“My little Jonny,” she warbled, holding his hand and patting it as she presented him with the traditional festive red packet, as she had done every year of his life. Her shoulders were draped thinly in a red cardigan. The faintly musical clamour of a lion dance troupe performing down the street sounded from a distance. Grandma was palpably frail now, and her tiny hands around his were bony.
“My handsome, clever Jonny. They said you wouldn’t make it. But you did.”
He gazed down at the koi in their new pond, each one a moving brushstroke of orange or red, like mingling drops of bright dye spreading through the dark, shallow water.
Later, as they were sitting at the little round marble-topped table in the kitchen sipping tea and eating love-letter biscuits, she suddenly got up and disappeared, returning after a few minutes. “I was doing some cleaning and I found this,” she said, producing a battered, brown-splotched exercise book, its pages yellowed and dog-eared, and handed it across the table to him.
It was the journal he had attempted to keep during the great illness of his youth.
He stared down at it, his hands suddenly unsteady, and slowly opened the brittle pages.
At first, all his eyes could register were pencil marks, a time-lightened shade of silver-slate, spiralling in recognisable patterns within the faded lines of the exercise book. His penmanship hadn’t changed over the years. Taped to the inside front cover was that long ago fortune: Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
As he began to make out words and sentences on the pages, he marvelled at how they echoed with such familiarity in his head, yet sounded so far away that they might as well have belonged to a different galaxy. He had not written anything in such a long time that the effort to recall the act of writing was almost headache-inducing. As he turned each page, he bent lower and lower over the book, fingering its yellowed leaves with something bordering on incredulity.
As he read the distant words scrawled there in his own handwriting, a vague feeling of guilt began to creep over him, as if he were committing an illicit act against his conscience. It was as if he were reading the diary of a stranger.
24
That night, he went to April’s house and sat on the stairs outside her flat until she arrived home. It had been several weeks since he had seen her.
While he was waiting, a deliveryman came round with a bouquet of flowers, and he had to sign for them. The flowers came with a card, which he could not stop himself from peeking at; on it was printed: “If you change your mind, I’ll be waiting. Love from Jerome.”
April’s footsteps arrived nearly an hour later and stopped in surprise to see him there.
They walked down to the neighbourhood playground and sat side by side on the springy seahorses.
The area was deserted save for a couple of sociable crickets, but a string of cheerful light bulbs, left over from some community event, glimmered on the perimeter like friendly fairy lights. From one of the windows in the tall housing blocks wafted the lusty strains of someone playing a golden oldie on repeat.
She gathered her hair up into a ponytail and the breeze picked up the wisps around her face.
“I need your help,” Keh said.
She looked at him expectantly.
He took a deep breath. “I want to write a book,” he said.
“The Not-So-Great Singaporean novel? I think that’s been written already. It’s a ten-year series of multiple-choice maths questions and you can buy it at Popular for $19.90.”
“April, I’m serious.”
She pretended to fall off her seahorse. “I didn’t know you wrote.”
“Well, I don’t. I can’t, to be honest. That’s why I need your help.”
“Why do you suddenly want to write a book?”
“You said I should write my own narrative.”
She laughed. “I meant that figuratively. Besides, you know that no one reads books any more, right?”
“I don’t care if no one reads it. I just want to start writing it. I don’t just want to be seen through a screen any more. I don’t even know how to begin, but I’m going to write a book. One that Sparky and Sandy can have read to them. And I can’t do it without you.”
She propped her chin up on her seahorse’s colourful head and gazed at him as they both wobbled comfortably. There was moonlight glinting coolly off the playground slides. “What will your book be about?”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about my last film. The Movie That Everyone Saw. It was probably the last real film I’ll ever do. Do you remember how the characters in that film, Henry and Violette, were actors acting in a movie?”
She nodded. “The highly unspecific movie with the boy-meets-girl plot device.”
“Yes. That’s the story I want to write. The story of the movie that no one has ever seen or ever will see.”
“You’re going to give the marginalised movie a voice?”
He hunched his shoulders over his skittish fibreglass steed. “You’re always laughing at me.”
“No, I’m not.” Her curious eyes reflected the yellow lampposts as the welcome night breeze fanned gently through her dark hair. “Tell me more. Will it be in the first person or third? Will the main character be you?”
He pondered, looking up into the cloudless night sky. “All of the characters will secretly be me, like how all of the characters I’ve ever played were me.”
She was quiet and the crickets hummed.
“You know that people are going to wonder if it’s a veiled autobiography. What if some of the other actors or industry folks think you’re referring to them? You know how sensitive their type can be.”
He paused to think.
“I guess we’d better open the book with a disclaimer, then.”
“Ugh,” she said. “Don’t be so obvious.”
In the vignette of the streetlamp’s light and shadow, he grinned at her, Adjonis Keh’s irresistible winning smile. “One day, the wind will change, and then when you have to get an official photo taken for your newspaper byline or your passport or something, you’ll regret it. So, don’t keep rolling your eyes at me, young lady.”
“I take it back,” said April. “You should embark on a new career as a writer. A writer of fortune cookies, maybe.”
“I like fortune cookies,” said Keh, thinking back to how it had all begun, and all the different lives he had lived, and how all of his worlds had been portals to other worlds. He liked the thought that together, he and she could create a new thing that had never existed before, and that in that work, his words and her words could merge and meld so that no reader would be able to tell where hers ended and his began. Even more, he liked the thought that sometimes, an ending could be the same as another beginning. And from beginning to end, any resemblance to persons living or dead would be entirely coincidental.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to everyone at Epigram Books (Edmund, Jason and Victoria, in particular) and all who support the Epigram Books Fiction Prize; to my awesome work family; to Aloysius, who’d wanted to be the first to read this book long before it was written; and to Vanathi, Jeanne, Alex, Sam, Her Majesty Queen Hon and all my family and friends.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
May Seah has spent the better part of the last decade as a culture reporter, and currently works as a senior digital lifestyle journalist with Channel NewsAsia. Highlights of her professional career include sitting in Sheldon’s spot on the set of The Big Bang Theory, training to be a K-pop star in Seoul, being asked by Chow Yunfat for a selfie, and listening to Sir David Attenborough tell her about the reproductive habits of Algerian jirds. The Movie That No One Saw is her first novel.
The annual Epigram Books Fiction Prize promotes contemporary creative writing and rewards excellence in Southeast Asian literature. It is awarded to the best manuscript of a full-length, original and unpublished novel. Originally restricted to Singaporean citizens, permanent residents and Singapore-born writers,
the EBFP is now open to all of ASEAN for novels written in or translated into the English language.
For more information, please visit EBFP.EPIGRAMBOOKS.SG
