The Catherine Lim Collection

by Catherine Lim

  “There, I told you!” cried the old man triumphantly as a child was brought out, dead. “A male-child, quite dead. He can lie in the coffin beside me.”

  “Make sure you have a proper coffin when you die,” said Old Mother.

  Wee Tiong closed his eyes tight, pressed his hands against his ears. He was crying, and the tears collected inside his glasses, making him perceive things only dimly.

  He chased her round the garden with his walking stick. He was in his death-clothes; he must have just got up from his coffin.

  “You did not do your duty as a daughter-in-law!” he shouted in anger at her, waving the walking stick wildly in the air.

  “You did not come near my coffin to pay last respects. What sort of daughter-in-law are you?”

  He spoke in English, he who was always shy of words outside his own dialect. Gloria ran and hid behind a bush. It was no use. He caught up with her, and then she eluded his grasp and ran into a building, an old Chinese temple with many carved pillars and priests in yellow robes walking about and chanting.

  “Jesus, Mary, Joseph – ” she panted, and out of the shadows emerged the idiot, grinning, to catch her and deliver her to the old man.

  “You unfilial daughter-in-law,” he rasped, his beard moving stiffly on his chin.

  “Oh, Blessed Mother of God – ” she had a rosary in her hand. She gripped it, to protect her from the evil.

  Chapter 5

  Angela parked her Toyota Corolla by the roadside, making sure it was not too near the ditch, overgrown with thorny bushes perilous to a new car. She took out the tiffin carrier of food, still hot and steaming, locked the car and carefully threaded her way along planks thrown over the muddy ground.

  What a way to reach the old one’s place – all those thorns and now these planks with the rusty nails sticking out of them, threatening with tetanus those poor little barefoot children playing noisily around.

  But the old one’s house was at least an improvement on the one in Changi, the one near that dreadful muddy pond, devil-haunted. It was a large wooden house and was presentable if kept clean and tidy. But the old ones – both of them – had been extremely untidy: she had spent the better part of many a visit sweeping, wiping the dust off table-tops, putting things in order that they had left in a mess. The careless Ah Kum Soh and the idiot one contributed to the mess; Angela had seen soiled clothes in heaps on the bathroom floor, soiled kitchen rags lying under chairs and had severely scolded the irresponsible woman.

  The house was no tidier now. Angela winced to find, as she walked in, a jumble of urns, joss-stick containers with the ash spilling over, torn prayer paper – obviously remnants from the funeral, now months past. But the altar table for the old man had been newly cleaned; the old man’s framed photograph hung above it, and on the table, in neat symmetry, were little cups of tea, plates of oranges and small jars for the joss-sticks. The cups and jars were in pretty blue-and-white porcelain. Angela looked closer: they interested her, for they were very much like the antique pottery pieces that Mee Kin was collecting. Where had her mother-in-law got them from? Then she remembered. There was a great deal of pottery and old furniture that the old one had been given by her mother who must have got them from her own mother. Some of them must be at least a hundred years old. Angela remembered a dark musty room in which they lay untended, covered by gunny sacks and masses of cobwebs. Once when the children were small and on a visit to the grandparents, they had gone into the room to play and had run out screaming, having disturbed an enormous nest of cockroaches which ran with them out of the room.

  “Mother, I’m here. See, I’ve brought some food for you,” said Angela brightly, going into her mother-in-law’s room, where the old woman sat on her large plank bed, the bun of hair at the back of her head loosened, combing the long, scanty strands with a wooden comb.

  Angela put the tiffin carrier on a small table beside the bed, and proceeded to dismantle the tall structure, tier by tier, to show the delicious steaming food cooked specially for the old one by Mooi Lan.

  “Pigs’ trotters with ginger,” said Angela. “Mooi Lan doesn’t cook it as well as you, but it’s not bad this time. Chicken and mushroom soup, fried prawns – ”

  “So much food for only the three of us,” murmured Old Mother. “You shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble.”

  Angela would have liked to have said, “Please, Mother, don’t give all this good food this time to that gluttonous Ah Kum Soh and her idiot son who is greedier than a pig,” but she contented herself with saying, emphatically, “Mother, I told Mooi Lan to cook this food specially for you. It’s meant for you. You haven’t been eating well. You must build up your strength again.”

  “Thank you. You have a kind heart,” said Old Mother who had stopped combing and oiling her hair, and was tying it back into a bun at the back of her head. The conversation would have ended then, so little had she to say to this daughter-in-law, but Angela’s cheerful good humour persisted, and the pigs’ trotters, chicken and mushroom soup and fried prawns were dragged back to serve for the niceties of discourse. She described, in detail, how Mooi Lan had prepared them, how the capable servant girl had gone to market specially early to get the really fresh prawns she had reserved the day before, for the prawn seller would not wait beyond a certain time, so popular were his prawns. Old Mother listened politely, repeated “Thank you” and “So much food. You shouldn’t have brought so much food,” and then was silent.

  The niceties could be stretched no longer, and Angela soon fell silent too, thinking, for the hundredth time, that her mother-in-law was certainly a very difficult old woman. Why couldn’t she be like Mee Kin’s mother? It had nothing to do with education. Mee Kin’s mother was illiterate too, but she was prepared to learn and move with the times. She already knew some English words, she got along superbly with the younger generation, even the grandchildren. She had, long ago, abandoned the solemn drabness of the bun of hair at the back of the head for a simple, neat shingled style that combined nicely the decorum of age and the need to keep up with the times.

  A shingled style for Old Mother? She could never suggest it. The old one would recoil in horror.

  Then – what a relief! – a new subject presented itself, leaving behind the exhausted remnants of pigs’ trotters and prawn markets. It dragged back to life a conversation that had flagged, dropped and died, and made the visit less intolerable.

  “Ah Tiong and Gek Choo’s son; is he all right now?” asked Angela, knowing that Old Mother had visited Gek Choo in hospital, a few days after the birth of the baby. She herself had gone on the very day itself. The baby was unwell. Born prematurely, he already awaited an operation that the doctors wanted to perform to correct an intestinal abnormality.

  “I’m not sure, I never saw the child. The doctors kept him in a separate part of the hospital,” said Old Mother. Angela wanted to ask, “Is it true what I heard? Ah Tiong went to Old Father’s grave to pray and make offerings, because of a frightful dream he had just before Gek Choo gave birth. Is it true?” But she refrained, sensing her mother-in-law’s reluctance to talk.

  She said, “I’m going to see Gek Choo afterwards. I’ve got some small gifts for the baby and the little girls.” Old Mother said nothing, and Angela continued, “I wish you could come to Mark’s birthday party, but I know that your health is not very good now, and you need a lot of rest. Mark will be disappointed that his grandmother won’t be able to attend.”

  The extent of the hypocrisy startled her now. She would not recount this to Mark, but she would laugh over it with Mee Kin, Dorothy and the others, for they too sometimes flattered their old in-laws outrageously, being so anxious to please.

  “Mark’s birthday,” repeated Old Mother, “I almost forgot.” She said ‘Ah Muck’; the pronunciation was offensive, but not as offensive as Chinaman’s imitation of it, imitation with malicious intent to cause embarrassment to the boy.

  “I almost forgot,” said Old Mother, and sh
e got up slowly, with effort, from the large wooden bed, and shuffled to a cupboard. Angela watched, and she was back in a minute with a small red packet, the gift money inside.

  “For Mark. For him to grow up tall, to be good in his studies, to be good and obedient to his parents,” said Old Mother, handing over the packet and chanting the good wishes in ritualistic monotone.

  “Thank you – there’s no need, there’s really no need,” said Angela, receiving the packet nevertheless, and ready to return the money, twice over, in some form or other. It made her uneasy to receive gifts of money from her old mother-in-law for herself or for her children.

  The visit was at an end. Old Mother made to get up to empty the gift food into her own containers and return the tiffin carrier, properly washed, but Angela said hastily, “No need to do that, Mother, no need. I can collect it another day. And get Ah Kum Soh to wash it. Don’t do it yourself. I suppose she’s gone out for her mahjong?”

  Old Mother said, ‘Yes,’ and Angela concluded that the idiot one was out with her. Thank God for that – the less she saw of him, the better.

  Old Mother again made to get up, to accompany her to the door, but she said, “No need, Mother. You go on resting. I’ll go out myself.”

  She peeped into the old dark room on her way out. Her eyes picked out desolate shapes of abandoned old chairs, jars, pots, and in a corner, a massive, carved four-poster bed, the ferocity of the carven dragons or serpents or whatever on the posts softened by the desolate masses of cobwebs.

  What a creepy room, she thought and hurried past, not wanting to look again upon the scene of decay and death. Her eyes fell on the blue-and-white altar cups and jars again; the photograph of the old man with the small piercing eyes and stiff wispy beard jutting out on his chin seemed to compel her attention. She looked up, met the eyes and looked away.

  She left the house hurriedly, glad to be out in the bright sunshine again and returned to her shining Toyota Corolla.

  The visit to Gek Choo, one more visit, and I shall have done a lot for today, thought Angela as she drove off.

  The lift had broken down, so she had to walk the seven flights up to the flat. She panted, wiped off the perspiration from the forehead, looked into the little mirror in her powder compact to make sure her make-up was all right and resumed her climb up.

  Who would believe, she thought, as she looked at the dirty walls scrawled with graffiti and the corridor railings with the paint peeling off, and stepped quickly aside, out of the way of a group of noisy, dishevelled children playing about along the corridors – who would believe that a couple worth more than a million dollars, with five small children, would live in a place like that?

  It was people like Chinaman and his wife that Singapore ought to be ashamed of – people loaded with money, renting out their luxurious properties and staying in Government-subsidised flats meant for low-income people. Chinaman had bought the flat in his wife’s mother’s name – he could never have gone on to buy those two valuable properties otherwise. Chinaman calculated his every move well. He and Gek Choo were always complaining that their flat was too small, yet had no intention of moving. The reason was plain: they would not have Old Mother. Well, the old one had decided to continue staying in the wooden house with Ah Kum Soh and the idiot one, so the question of which son she would be staying with never arose, mercifully. Angela’s sense of relief was tangible; it translated into a continual flow of gifts of food and money to the old one. The new house was being built: She had got Dorothy’s cousin, one of Singapore’s most creative architects to design it for her. They sat down for many hours discussing the special features, especially the separate wing for the old in-laws, should the need arise. “A separate wing,” Angela had said, “with its own entrances and facilities, such as a kitchen. I will get them a servant to cook for them and keep the place clean, but it will be quite separate from the main house, see? Then we won’t tread on each other’s toes, see?”

  But the need had not arisen. The old father-in-law had died, and the old mother-in-law preferred to remain where she was.

  “I shall visit her often,” exclaimed Angela in an exuberance of good humour, when the matter was settled to everyone’s satisfaction. “I shall make sure she has good food to eat, and that the irresponsible Ah Kum Soh does her work properly.”

  She had tried to get the troublesome woman and her idiot son to return to their relatives after the funeral, but Old Mother had shown displeasure, and so she had desisted. Anyway, even Ah Kum Soh had her uses. She played mahjong all the time, but she was Old Mother’s preferred companion. And it was yet another malady of her mother-in-law, in her old age, to dote on the idiot foster-son.

  What a horror – a born imbecile – and Angela wondered, with a thrill of shocked fascination – if the new son of the black sheep of the family would also become an imbecile? The premature birth, and now the operations that had to be performed. She had heard of old parents’ arms reaching out for vengeance beyond the grave. Oh, how frightful.

  The baby was home from the hospital already, but Gek Choo said, would have to be taken back for regular checkups. The doctors would decide when to carry out the first operation.

  She spoke quietly, matter-of-factly, after having thanked Angela for the gifts for the baby and her four little girls. Angela was all effusiveness as she carried up the child, a weak, soft tiny thing unlike any of his healthy, lovely sisters.

  The triumph of having the long yearned-for son at last must have been considerably diminished for Chinaman and his wife. But right now, Angela was all genuine concern as she held the pitiful little thing in her arms and suggested that if they had any problems with the doctors at the hospital, they could let Boon know, for he knew the top brass there. Things were often more speedily and efficiently done this way.

  Gek Choo thanked her again in her matter-of-fact, tight-lipped way and ensured her that everything was going on satisfactorily. She looked wan and tired; Angela took furtive looks around her and saw that the place was in a mess. Some of the hooks had come off one window curtain; it sagged horribly on one side. There were cups and glasses unwashed; the youngest girl was wearing a dress with a torn sleeve.

  For God’s sake, Angela wanted to say, give up that miserable cashier’s job at the bank, you and your husband don’t need the money, stay at home and look after your children, and get a proper servant to keep the place in presentable condition. She knew Gek Choo had a Malay washerwoman who came in three times a week to wash the clothes and do the cleaning up. Every morning, an elderly woman from the tenth floor came down to pick up the youngest girl before Wee Tiong drove the other girls to school or kindergarten, and Gek Choo took a bus to the bank. But what would happen once the maternity leave was over and someone had to take care of the baby?

  It was on the tip of Angela’s tongue to ask about that frightful dream before the birth of the baby, and the subsequent visit to the old man’s grave, but she desisted, knowing that Gek Choo would laugh a little, frown a little and then change the subject abruptly. But the matter of the servant – this she had to be sure about; as a concerned relative, she had to ask, “Who will take care of the baby when you go back to work?”

  Gek Choo said she was able to extend her maternity leave; meanwhile the elderly woman taking care of Chwee Hwa was looking around for a suitable person for her.

  “Can Mooi Lan help you? Her mother may know a lot of people. She lives in the tiny ulu village in Johore Bahru and there are bound to be many women there looking for work.”

  “No. Thank you very much for your kind offer. But I think we’ll be all right.”

  You’re afraid, thought Angela with some malice, that you may have to pay the same wages that I pay Mooi Lan. Won’t that make you and Husband Abacus recoil in alarm? But if you look for one yourself, you may be lucky enough to get her for a pittance – a half-witted village woman or someone from an orphanage or delinquent girls’ home!

  Gek Choo was repulsive, but the four li
ttle girls charmed her. They were very pretty little girls with very lovely hair and complexions. The two eldest were in primary school; they spoke to her unabashedly about what they did in school, and called her ‘Auntie Angela’ in their sweet little girl voices. The third was in kindergarten; she was the prettiest, with enormous eyes and long lashes, and Angela liked her best of all.

  The exuberance of the little girls as they crowded around Angela and their endless chatter caused even Gek Choo to relax, smile and request the youngest one to sing a song for Auntie Angela. Chwee Hwa was three years old, but she stood straight and tall in front of Angela and with adult solemnity, sang a song in Mandarin.

  Angela was delighted. She hugged the little girl and requested another song.

  How I wish my Michelle were as pretty, she thought. And my Michael. If only he were as open and spontaneous as these cute little girls! How strange that Chinaman and Chinawoman should have children like these!

  She left in high spirits. She had never seen Gek Choo in such a good mood, and she reminded her to bring the little girls to Mark’s birthday party.

  “I won’t be able to come, but Ah Tiong will take them,” she said, and smiled again when her daughters swarmed round her, wanting to know more about the party. Poor little things, thought Angela. So pretty and living in such a squalid environment.

  The stench of urine hit her in the face as she reached the ground floor, panting. She put a piece of perfumed tissue paper to her nose and mouth and again was nearly knocked down by a group of noisy, unkempt children chasing a cat with tin cans and stones.

  Poor baby, she thought. How pathetic. To wait for a son for 10 years and then have this weakling. Again, the dreadful possibility occurred to her, but she dismissed it.

  There’s no truth in such dreams, she thought. I have had many frightening dreams myself since the old man’s death, and I count them for nothing. It’s explained purely by psychology, as Mark says.