It Never Rains On National Day

by Jeremy Tiang

  The sun is almost directly overhead now, bleaching the pale stone of his building and illuminating the dancing dust in the bedroom. There is no one out that she can see, no one at all, the alleyway and back gardens are empty, not even a cat, not even a shadow shifting in the windows opposite. She has heard there are abattoirs still amongst the expensive apartment blocks, along with a handful of the packing plants that gave the area its name. Crates of raw flesh, being loaded onto trucks.

  He has seen the funny side and is smiling at her now, still nursing his forearm. If anything was going to happen—but of course it never was. She pulls the thought into daylight and laughs at it. He stands before her, schlubby, well-meaning, waiting for the joke to be explained. When she just smiles back at him, he says, Another Coke?

  Why not? she tips the end of her cigarette into the empty can, adds the previous butt from the window sill, and hands the lot to him. Never enough caffeine and sugar.

  Whatever gets you through the day. He climbs back into the dinginess of the flat. After a moment, she hears the tap start. He must be running cold water over his arm. She allows herself a dab of guilt—but it was an accident, and he will heal, and who gets to be an adult without visible scars?

  She sits on the edge of the platform, her legs dangling over the ladder. Just a little longer, she senses, probably no more than thirty minutes, and it will be time to go, to wander from his home, imagining the buildings she walks past each holding a slaughterhouse, hacking great slabs of animal into manageable chunks, hosing blood off concrete floors. But for a few minutes longer, this can be a place of safety. That’s fine, no more is required.

  Her day needs remarkably little to gain a shape, to feel less empty at the end. She doesn’t know where she’ll be tomorrow, or even an hour from now, but she’ll be somewhere. The wind fluffs her hair and she tilts her head back, admiring the lacquered blue bowl of the sky, wondrously cloudless, empty apart from the white blaze of the sun. There is nothing else, no fireworks, but it’ll do.

  National Day

  SO WE TAKE a boat to St John’s Island because where else can we go, every other place will be crowded and just for one night we want to leave the dormitories, the noise and stink of eight bodies pressed into each small room, just for a few hours we want to escape. Tomorrow is a public holiday so we will start work later than usual, not for our sakes but because the residents complain if construction starts too early while they are still asleep, and the foreman will not say anything if we are back at the site before ten.

  Even the ferry terminal is packed, this country is so small that people slosh around and are pushed into each corner. We gather near the bus stop, most of us arriving together from the site but some also from other errands. Antony’s girlfriend Veronica has come to see him off, to snatch a few extra minutes with him, and we pretend to look away but still hoot when they kiss. She is embarrassed but smiles gamely, a friendly girl. He waves her onto the bus and strides over to us, a heavy plastic bag tugging at one arm, and we are complete.

  We walk past the Formica counters with their bored, resentful clerks, punished for one infraction or another with a holiday shift. Arul has been before with one of the young things he carts around, and he says they only check tickets on the way back, sometimes you can talk your way out of it, say you lost the stub. We are unsure if this will work for so many of us but Neelish says Come on, let’s take the risk, and as always we end up listening to him.

  There are a few piers with boats going in different directions, some to Indonesia, some closer by, and we follow the lines down, looking for our berth. Most of the passengers are local and Neelish says, Look, look at them running away from their own birthday party, what kind of people are they, that would never happen back at home. We try to shush him but he chatters on. Few heads turn to look at us, no one cares what we have to say.

  The boat is smaller than we expected, even smaller than a bus, but somehow it contains all of us effortlessly. To the front are young men with plastic fishing boxes and sheaves of gear, and the rest of the space is occupied by teenagers in identical red T-shirts, maybe twenty or thirty of them. We sit on a bench facing back towards the mainland, clearing a space for Jairam’s crutches, leaning across each other to talk in our mixture of languages, fractured English and Tamil and Bengali, reaching for whatever words we can find to make ourselves understood. Around us the sailors coil ropes and pull gates shut.

  Something slackens and then we are moving, slowly at first and then juddering faster. A cool spray rises as we move past the other boats, then leaving the concrete embrace of the harbour behind for the relief of open water. The sun is not setting yet but the shadows are long, and the tall buildings of the city are at their most attractive, glittering as brightly as the water. They look like beautiful toys, like we could reach out and pluck them from where they stand, the great wheel of the Flyer, the three reaching fingers of the casino, the hard-angled glass and steel of the CBD.

  We gape and take pictures if we have cameras on our phones. Mohan points at the lotus flower museum and shouts, Look, I built that. Ah, we laugh at him, but have you ever been inside, knowing he hasn’t, because who could afford that admission fee, and just to look at old porcelain or some foreign painting? Still, we cannot resist doing it too, calling out what we’ve made, office buildings, skyscraping banks, the Gardens by the Bay with their giant metal trees. That’s mine, I built that. Despite ourselves, we feel a flicker of something at being a part of this machine, and having operated the cranes and laid the bricks that brought the great city into being.

  The boat pulls past Sentosa Cove but it takes us a moment to recognise it, knowing that the houses there cost fifty million dollars at least, as expensive as the moon. From this side they look merely grubby, washed-out pastels behind a scrubby screen of trees, not the palaces we imagined, but then nothing human-made could look well against the blue-green sea, its neat triangular waves in parallel lines as regular as a child’s drawing.

  Our conversation sputters and we fall into a lull, hypnotised as the mainland slips away and there is space, as if someone has drawn a circle a mile across and placed us alone in its centre. The trip takes less than an hour, and soon we are passing the giant oil drums of Pulau Bukum, the twin green hillocks of the Sisters Islands, and then St John’s, its name inscribed in white letters on the slope approaching us, slightly overgrown with grass.

  The fishermen are ready to disembark first, leaping onto the jetty before the boat has quite docked, juggling heavy bait boxes and carbon rods, then the teenagers form an orderly line and troop ashore, breaking off in clusters for a photograph under the welcome arch. We are the last to disembark but that is fine, we are not in a hurry and it is easier to manoeuvre Jairam on shore without other people in the way. The crew stand with one foot on the step and the other on land, either side of us, holding the boat in place.

  We stand for a moment, telling ourselves this is still Singapore, and yet it is not, this is more like home, so many trees, such silence. A tidy path leads away from the dock and we obediently follow it. There is nothing to the island, it can barely be half a mile in each direction. There is a small hill at one end with a campsite at its peak, where we can see the teenagers shucking their rucksacks, standing in a circle and holding hands. From a safe distance as we amble, a couple of scrawny cats eye us and we wonder what it must be like to come here maybe on a boat, only to find there is nothing, no food, no way back. Mohan, soft-hearted, throws them the remains of a banana from his pocket, but they wait till we are far away before darting up to it.

  There are signboards all along the path, green and white and yellow, and Feroz snorts, These people don’t know what to do unless there are black and white words to instruct them, they don’t dare wipe their own backsides without government approval. We stare at the different-sized rectangles, making out the words do not pluck flowers no fishing beyond this point warning no lifeguard on duty.

  Looping back to the beach as the sun
rests of the top of the tallest buildings on the horizon, we find a place to settle. A floating rope twenty metres from land cordons off the safe swimming area but we wouldn’t want to go in anyway, the water here is oil-slicked and gritty, and even the beach is fouled from the ships passing by and the refinery. We sit on towels and sarongs, anything we thought to bring.

  Antony pulls from his plastic bag biscuits and fruit and other things that Veronica gets from her ma’am, she says they are given but maybe she just takes them, we don’t ask, although the bread is hard and the apples starting to brown and soften, they would just go to waste otherwise. We are grateful because the canteen is closed on holiday evenings and we haven’t had dinner yet.

  What time do they start? says Feroz, it is his first National Day here and he is as excited as a child. Soon soon, we tell him, eat some fruit, uncle. We call him that because he is older than us, probably too old to be on a construction site but he lied to the recruiting agent who didn’t care as long as he got his cut. What else can he do? It’s the last chance for him, scraping together three lakh rupees to cover all the fees, hoping he can stay here long enough to earn that back and make a little more, not much, enough to retire on, hoping he is one of the lucky ones, not like Jairam, not like the ones who come back still in debt, the hollowed-out men every village has.

  A wave breaks unexpectedly high and Jairam flinches. We tell him not to worry, we are above the high water mark, and Neelish says, Yes, but if you’re not nice to us we’ll roll you down the beach, see if you can swim with one leg. Neelish has been taking steady nips from a small bottle containing we don’t want to ask what, but from the heat rising off him it must be samsu or toddy, something strong. Eat some bread, we tell him, something to soak up the alcohol, but he barely puts any in his mouth, rolling the rest into little pellets that he flicks into the waves.

  What if it rains? says Arul, but it won’t, it never rains on National Day. We have heard that they seed the clouds a week before to dry them out. The sky is a clean blue bowl, the thin moon just visible. Even with wind blowing off the sea, the air is blood-warm and heavy around us. Look, says Feroz, who has not taken his eyes off the skyline, and he is right, something has started, a hum of thirty thousand people’s excitement that we can feel even from here, and then fighter jets buzzing low over the city, apparently just missing half a dozen buildings and disgorging crimson parachutists billowing plumes of coloured smoke behind them. Showing off, sniffs Neelish, but even he is unable to take his eyes off the tiny falling figures.

  Gouts of music come to us, distorted by the wind, something jaunty with a thumping beat as if we are in a nightclub, and then some kind of military band. That’s the army marching in, says Sundram, who watched the whole thing on a coffeeshop TV last year. The rest of us have only seen moments, repeats in the news and pictures in the papers the next day. Guns are fired in quick sequence, pop pop pop pop, and there is more cheering.

  It is getting dark now. We pile up driftwood and palm leaves and newspapers from the bins, and Antony manages to get the fire going with his lighter, looking a bit shifty as he pulls it out because Veronica’s always asking him to quit, he should, cigarettes are so expensive in this city. We don’t really have any food to heat up although Arul makes a half-hearted attempt to toast some bread on a stick. The temperature will drop quickly now the sun is gone, and it’s comforting to huddle around the glow and warmth.

  I recognise this tune, says Feroz, brow furrowed, and we laugh, Of course you do, uncle, it’s that one. The theme song of this year, it’s been played everywhere, on radio and at train stations, something something island sunshine home, syrupy and bland even in these choppy bursts. Did you know the whole thing costs them seventeen million dollars every year? says Neelish, who spends his money at Internet cafés looking up facts like these. Imagine it, so much money for such bad music.

  What would we be doing, on an ordinary night? Sitting on our beds, ignoring the others around us loud on their disposable phones, or lying with heads under our pillows waiting for sleep to take us into another day, a step closer to return. Our few hours here feel stolen, an escape from normality rather than a return to it, as if our other lives have been utterly erased, as if there is nothing left but the scaffolding that we climb up and down all day, our feet never on solid ground.

  From up the hill behind us comes the sound of teenagers singing at the camp: Christ is the Lord of all. They have just one guitar, equally tuneless, their dirge as deadening as what drifts to us across the water, now back to the band music, pink and green floodlights shooting up into the darkening sky and swaying in time to the beat. Mohan the clown howls like a dog, his impression so unexpectedly accurate that we laugh all over again.

  A branch in the fire releases a burst of sparks and we jump. Even with the neon lines of the city back the way we came, there is something primal in the air, as if the noises on the mainland are the crashes and screams of war and we are the only ones who made it out, refugees crouched around our campfire as dark shadows approach. Many-limbed banyan trees stoop above the beach, their tendrils trembling even when the breeze dies down.

  What next? says Feroz, but we do not know. Is this one of the years when they bring in the tanks, or will there just be more children dancing? Maybe the tanks are only for when one of the neighbouring countries needs frightening. Not us, our countries are too poor to attack this island, however small it may be, and how could our governments drop bombs on this city when so many of their own citizens are working here?

  We stare out to sea as if we can actually follow the show, even though all we can see from here are the leftovers, lasers flicking across neighbouring buildings, helicopters hovering, speedboats churning by close to shore after finishing their turns by the floating platform. Celebrations in our own countries are not so choreographed, so tightly managed. How much fun can they be having? Yet we hear the clapping and stamping from across the water.

  Jairam quietly rubs lotion into the stump of his knee, which must be giving him pain, though we have never heard him complain. Antony waves his mobile phone around until he finds reception and has a whispered conversation with Veronica, asking what she’s doing and whether she misses him, and the rest of us think of women, girls we left behind in our villages who may or may not be waiting for us, maids or masseuses we encountered here now gone back or departed for countries even further away from their own. We feel not loneliness exactly, but a hollowness in the vicinity of the chest, a helplessness heightened by the wide ocean and starless infinity of the sky above us.

  The fishermen are giving up now, walking past with a few tiny specimens dangling from strings. They flung their rods from the causeway over to Lazarus Island, but now are moving back inland. Some seem to live in the kampong huts by the foot of the hill—caretakers? we wonder—and others are at the holiday bungalows, local boys who probably wear G2000 shirts and ties all week and are using the break to flee for a day, to fish and lie in the sun while they can, before responsibility and time thicken their waists and weigh them down. Some look in our direction as they pass but no one speaks to us.

  We are getting a little bored, though no one will admit this, but even boredom is a luxury, to be so still that we wish to move again. Some of us look at our phones, others build small sandcastles with plastic cups. The parade doesn’t hold much interest for us, at the moment it will be more dancing that we can’t see, hundreds of children or civil servants or volunteers running across the stage in neoprene costumes, telling some version of a story that doesn’t include us.

  Sandaled feet crunch decisively across the sand and then a handful of the teenagers are standing a safe distance away, looking ready to run. A slightly older man, maybe twenty, wearing the same red T-shirt as his charges steps towards us, his voice whiny but trenchant as he says, What are you doing?

  We are uncertain how to answer, it seems too obvious, so we say nothing, and stare at our feet or at him, and he continues, You’re not allowed to camp
here, and you shouldn’t light a fire, can’t you read the signs?

  You’re camping here too, points out Antony, but the man pretends not to hear. He says, It could be dangerous, I have a whole group of teenagers here, we shouldn’t have to put up with this after paying for the use of our campsite, all your illegal activity.

  We say, several of us at once, We’re next to the water, how can it be dangerous, we know what we’re doing, do you really think the fire will rush up the hill and burn you? Not all of us speak English but we try our best to make ourselves understood, waving and pointing to show what we mean. The man’s face clenches around the edges and he says, Okay, I’m asking you guys nicely, please get off this island now.

  This isn’t your island, mutters Jairam from the ground, the only one who hasn’t stood up, and Arul says, How, how, you tell me, the last boat for the day has left, you expect us to swim back to land, is it?

  The teenagers have been whispering amongst themselves, and now one of them comes over to the leader, a narrow-faced girl with a wispy fringe and pink plastic glasses, maybe fourteen, her skinny legs awkwardly connecting gym shorts and white ankle socks. The man curves his arm protectively without actually touching her, as if some kind of barrier was needed between us. Do you need help, Wilson? she says.

  Give me your phone, he says, and when she hands it over he brandishes it in our direction, gripping it so tightly the veins in his forearm stand out. He says, I can call the police, is that what you want, just one phone call and the police will come and catch you, and you can kiss your work permit goodbye.

  Go ahead and call, says Neelish, walking forward in a manner that is not exactly threatening but certainly not friendly. Call your police, do you think we’re scared, you think they’ll come out specially to catch us, everyone’s busy at the parade and all, even the coast guard boats are over there, but you can try, I don’t think we’re so important that they’ll come out here just for us, and you’re not so important either.