2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  • • •

  She called me bodoh, which means stupid or useless in Malay. She called me that right after I kissed her for the first time, under the yellow streetlamps of a side alley near the hawker center, where big-eared Caucasian businessmen wiped sweat off their foreheads and laughed uncertainly with their Singaporean wives.

  “Bodoh,” she said, her lips still near enough that I could feel the moisture of her breath.

  It’s hard to describe how I felt at that moment, surrounded by the smell of night and the swish of passing BMWs on the wet road. My country has no seasons; it’s summer and rain all year long. But I’ve seen winter and snow, on TV and in Hollywood movies, and maybe what I felt that night was a brief respite, the warmth of a discarded sweater on a snowy day.

  I kissed her again.

  • • •

  Huiling was a dancer. She danced with the Bishan Community Center Chinese Dance Association, and she was the best by far.

  “I knew you were a good dancer the first time I saw you, you know that?”

  “Rubbish,” she said. We were setting up some plywood props for an upcoming dance festival, and she paused to straighten an errant lantern. A basilisk, her basilisk, sat watching us from the shadows to stage left. My froglike chaan maneuvered for a more comfortable position on its flat head, splaying the long toes on its three legs as it climbed.

  “I did. You move like a mythical creature.”

  Huiling burst out laughing. “You move like a mythical creature too. A minotaur.”

  But she didn’t protest when I said she had a spot of gold glitter on her nose, and kissed her instead.

  “Hey bodoh, what’s over there?” she said, frowning.

  I turned to see the two screeching heads of a massive bird. They flew straight at me, beaks gaping. I screamed. In an instant it had passed through me, insubstantial.

  My heart was hammering. “Oh my God,” I said. “Don’t do that.”

  Huiling was laughing again.

  I put a hand to my chest. “Walau,” I said, smiling sheepishly, as the bird swooped to a stop behind her. Its wingspan was easily the length of the entire stage, and its twin beaks looked hard enough to crack heads. “Throwing rocs. It’s a good thing you don’t live in a glass house.”

  The following Monday, we sat in chapel in our stiff-collared uniforms and pretended to listen as Pastor Lim stood on stage and talked about the inventions of the past ten years: the Hubble Telescope, the Pentium processor, the Laserdisc.

  “After all these years,” he said, the microphone bobbing next to his Adam’s Apple, “there is still no invention greater than the Bible.”

  Huiling leaned over. “I volunteered to set up props again on Wednesday. Want to come?”

  I smiled and nodded. Later on, when Pastor Lim prayed for us and said Amen, I echoed him and meant it.

  “Amen.”

  • • •

  She was annoyed that I scored higher than her in Advanced Maths and Chemistry, and that homework was so easy for me. I tried to help, of course, but what started as fifteen minutes of tutoring interspersed with soft touches and wistful glances turned quickly to frustration.

  “It’s minus b square,” I said. It was a hot day, and sweat was itching under the fringe of hair on the back of my neck.

  “I know,” she snapped. “I just forgot to write it, okay?” She made a rough mark with her mechanical pencil, smudging the equation.

  “Mr. Tan deducts marks for that.”

  “Aiyah, stop bothering me lah!”

  Our time together, already limited by our parents and our schoolwork and our friends, began to seem less special. At times, we even fought.

  “I don’t want you to go, okay?” she said over the phone one night, her tone clipped. “Don’t go to East Coast Park with those people.”

  “Ling, it’s my church fellowship. Must go lah. Otherwise what do I say? Anyway you have rehearsal, right?”

  “You are too accommodating, you know that?”

  “Yah! I know! Otherwise how to accommodate you?”

  She hung up, right then. When I called back, she hung up again. The third time, it was her mother.

  “Hello?” said Huiling’s mum. She sounded concerned.

  That time, I hung up.

  • • •

  It felt like we were the worst couple in the world. It didn’t make any sense to me. How could a boyfriend and girlfriend fight so much?

  “The third year is the worst,” confided our friend Zhirong. “Margaret and I nearly split up then. It was bad.”

  “Last year you said the second year was the worst. And before that, you said the eighth month was the worst.”

  “Well, err, those are bad too. But the third year, I’m telling you. Worst.”

  We never broke up. Both of us said the words on numerous occasions. We didn’t talk for weeks, sometimes months. We had slammed phones and bitter pager beeps. We had cold shoulders and skipped birthdays and awkward social gatherings.

  “Can we please just address the elephant in the room?” said Margaret. “It’s fine if you two don’t want to talk to each other, but you’re making it really uncomfortable. Donny, you’re clutching your fork like you’re going to stab her.”

  “There’s no elephant in the room,” I said, because behind Huiling was a humongous manticore, always her favorite when she put on her passive-aggressive act. The manticore’s meter-long fangs dripped poison, which plopped and sizzled on the white tablecloth. It was making the restaurant smell like a butcher’s coffin.

  We had intermissions, though, between fights. Those were the times I loved her most, when she’d glance upward at me, her eyes uncertain as a bird’s. It made me happy, holding the hand that I was convinced was made to be in mine. Because… why else could we see each others’ summons? It had to be fate. Perhaps that was why our breakups never lasted.

  In those cursory times, those cracked-china moments, it seemed Huiling agreed.

  • • •

  “You only have one chance at life, you know?” I heard Madam Chia say, standing in front of the remedial Physics class on a drippy Saturday morning. I was at school for a prefect’s meeting, and I found myself taking the long way around school so I could pass by room 4-F. There was a dragon in the room, snorting out charged clouds of soot as it rested its head on the floor. Its green eyes remained wide open, suspicious. Trailing behind me was a will-o’-wisp, its tiny lantern casting orange light on the dripping stucco.

  “You all know your O levels are in three months right? Your marks on the mock exam were horrible. Worst I’ve ever seen.” Her voice echoed out into the hall, sounding far away but each word striking like a bell. “You all better pull your socks up in these last three months. If you all don’t do well and don’t get into university, you might as well be failures in life.”

  I was waiting for her in the refectory when remedial class ended. She made a beeline for me, sat down, and rested her head on her arms. “I’m dead,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t remember anything. Madam Chia shouted at me.”

  “What did you forget?”

  She looked up from her arms. “Bodoh. Let’s go somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  She grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet. We walked out of school together, looking up at the cloudy sky. She didn’t say a word until we clambered into the red pleather seats on bus 661.

  “Let’s ride to the end of the line. As far away from this stupid place as possible.”

  “Sure.”

  Thirty minutes later we ended up at Changi Beach, where dark waves crashed over crab-infested boulders. Hairy half-coconut shells bobbed in and out, following the tide. The breeze was fresh and salty, and smelled of drizzle. Huiling looked calmer. She pulled me off the bus and off the pavement.

  “Do you believe in destiny?” she said as we walked along the beach, our toes sinking into the cold sand.

  “What do you mean?”
<
br />   “Chia always says you only have one chance at life. But what does it mean? A chance to do what?” She looked up at me. “Are we meant to do something special in life? Or is life just random? Sometimes I think it’s just random. But what if I’m just missing something important?”

  I thought she was talking about her poor results at school. She had that hunched look about her that she got when she was bested by a complicated Maths problem.

  “Forget about Chia,” I said, tossing a dried tree seed into the waves. “I think we’re destined for certain things in life. But Chia won’t be the one to help us find out.”

  She stopped, suddenly, and turned to face me. “How come I can only summon monsters?”

  Her voice grated, like the rusted edge of a pocketknife. The wind blew her hair up around her face, framing her eyes like a dark halo.

  The waves surged in behind her to crash on the shore. My heart fluttered as I realized that one of the “waves” sat glistening, half-submerged in the grey sunlight. Huiling’s leviathan.

  “Manticores. Minotaurs. Hydras. Spiders. Bats. Snakes. Giant squids.” She listed her summons one by one, her eyes never leaving mine. “Monsters. Villains. Disgusting creatures of darkness and evil. That’s me.”

  “You just prefer them.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve tried. I can’t summon anything pretty or nice. Yesterday I tried to summon a unicorn, and I got a hellhound.”

  “Nothing bad about a hellhound.”

  “But I can’t summon anything else, that’s the point.”

  “But that’s fine,” I said impatiently. “I like your summons. I recognize them. Like the way your kraken has a crusting on barnacles on its right eye. Or the way your giant spiders chitter. I think they’re great.”

  “But what if nobody else thinks so?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter,” I said. “Nobody else can see them anyway, right?”

  She focused on her shoes. “Sometimes I feel like they can.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “This is it, you know, bodoh? In three months everything will be over. Some of us will go on to JC, some of us won’t. Everyone will be in a different place.” She coughed and smoothed out the un-tucked edge of her uniform. “You know I won’t make it to the same school as you, right?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” I said. “And you don’t know that. Anyway, there’s no point talking about this now. We’ll see what happens.”

  But what she said stayed with me, a touch of haze and drizzle in my heart. They came back to haunt me in the following months, when the moon sat lonely in the night sky and watched me study.

  Pastor Lim bowed his head on a Monday three months later and prayed for God to give us presence of mind during our exams. Clarity of thought, he said. Amen.

  I was too tired to echo him. The nights and days had melded together to me, an endless vortex of school, study, eat, sleep. On that particular Monday in chapel, it was time for sleep.

  The exams were two days away.

  • • •

  I pressed my mechanical pencil against the paper, methodically filling out oblong bubbles to spell out my name. The proctor stood, buzzard-like, on the stage at the front of the hall.

  Huiling sat ahead of me and to the right, five seats away in the air-conditioned hall. A four-legged drake stared back at me, its glassy eyes full of annoyance.

  She had grown more and more touchy over the past two months. She didn’t speak to me for weeks, and sometimes when she saw me her eyes would immediately harden, like a fire toad’s. It was all right. I knew she was stressed. I didn’t push her.

  But I still went to see her dance. Even when she wouldn’t talk to me. Even when I could see the simmer of her anger in every movement, when she would storm backstage after the final dance. Huiling’s dancing was like spring. And even though our exams approached and circles appeared under her eyes and she forgot steps sometimes, I was always glad I went to see her.

  I filled out the first bubble in the multiple-choice section, making sure I left no gaps in my shading.

  • • •

  On the final day of exams, I left the exam hall thoroughly exhausted. I stood there, blinking in the thick heat, wondering what to do next. I wasn’t the only one. My classmates gathered around me, finding their voices like miners emerging from a collapsed mine.

  My classmate Vincent ran up. “Yeah!!” he shouted. “It’s over!”

  The world stirred back into movement. People were laughing. Someone threw his backpack into the air, cheering, and it landed on the polished tile with a loud smack.

  I felt a smile take over my face.

  It was really over.

  • • •

  Christmas lights were hung up all along Orchard Road, and women in heels hurried by, protecting their handbags from warm droplets that fell from red-and-green bulbs in the post-rain drip. I was walking to the MRT station in a T-shirt and shorts, having folded away my Secondary school uniform for the last time two weeks ago.

  Beep. Beep.

  I glanced at my pager. It was Huiling. I ducked into a 7-11 and inserted twenty cents into one of the big orange payphones.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hi. Ling?”

  She didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “Hello?” I said eventually, worried that I had been cut off.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Silence again.

  I was about to see if I had another twenty cent coin when she spoke.

  “I have some news,” she blurted out.

  The tension in my gut came back immediately. Had she gotten her results already? It was about time for them to be mailed out. Was it bad news? Good news? Mediocre news?

  “What is it?” I said, perhaps a bit hastily.

  She hesitated. “I’m moving to England.”

  I nearly dropped the phone. “What?”

  Her voice sounded soft, like it was coming to me through velvet. She spoke quickly. “My father’s company is sending him there. They waited until after our O’s to tell me.”

  It was my turn to be silent. “When are you leaving?”

  “In three weeks.”

  We let the line hang silent for a good twenty seconds. I imagined her at home, kneeling on her bed, clutching the phone with both hands. I stood there in the 7-11, wedged into a corner between cases of Sprite and Tiger beer. An old man squeezed past me, holding two packs of cigarettes. The phone line, transmitting nothing but cloudy static, was the only thing connecting us. And my twenty cents was running out.

  “Stay there.” I said. “I’m coming to you.”

  “No,” she said. “My mum is home.”

  “Does it matter?” My face felt warm. “Come out then, if I can’t come over.”

  “I can’t. We have to eat dinner.”

  “Ling. How about tonight? Meet me at—”

  I cursed. My time had run out, and a shrill monotone assaulted me from the earpiece.

  I replaced the handset, and got on the first bus towards home.

  • • •

  She didn’t want to go. It was unfair. She hated her parents. They were awful. She’d try to stay with her aunt. Her cousin. Her grandfather. Anything. She’d even rather be homeless than go to England.

  I agreed. She was already sixteen—shouldn’t that be considered grown-up? She could make her own decisions about where she was going to live. Her parents couldn’t force her. Surely there was a law about it.

  But as the days passed, I began to have an undercurrent of second thoughts. I sat with a tiny golden deer on the ground floor of my flat, picking at the stained concrete. Huiling showed up with a massive scorpion, stepping across the parking lot like she owned it.

  “Hi,” she said, her mouth a cross between a smile and a grimace.

  “Hi.”

  “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  I took a deep breath. My stomach felt cold, like I’d waded
out too far at the beach and felt the ocean’s true cold underneath the cold surface layer.

  I blurted it out. “I think you should go.”

  She froze, mid-step.

  “I mean, it’s an opportunity. England’s a good country, right? You should be happy there. I mean, you’ve been here all your life, but… you don’t like it here, do you? You’d be crazy to. Nobody likes it here. All anyone cares about is what you do in school. How you do on exams. Why you’re not turning into the ‘useful person’ everyone wants. I think there’s more to life than being just useful. Our O’s results are coming back soon. You could go and leave that crap all behind.”

  I stopped, aware that I had said everything perhaps a little too fast.

  Huiling was looking at me in a way I couldn’t describe. I got prickles on my neck from the way she was looking at me. It was like the silence in the kitchen after you have just shattered your favorite cup. It was like a whistle of wind through the roof during an afternoon rainstorm, when nobody is home.

  “You think my life is some crap that I don’t like?”

  “No—I didn’t mean—”

  “You already think my results are going to be bad, don’t you?”

  “No—”

  She just glared at me. Contained in that glare was the biggest accusation of all: I thought our time together was meaningful. Apparently you didn’t.

  “I didn’t mean that, Ling. In England you could do whatever you wanted. You could dance.”

  “I don’t want to dance,” she said, and spun away so I couldn’t see her face. “How come you don’t understand either? You’re just like my parents. I don’t want to dance. I want… this.” She twitched her hand, and somehow encompassed everything beautiful in the world. “Don’t… you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Suddenly the air was full of white. Bright cottony tufts spilled from her hands into the air, like an infinite dandelion. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said, her back still turned. “You really are stupid.”

  The white tufts swarmed me. It was only when they got close to my face that I saw that each little tuft had a pair of beady red eyes and a sharp pair of fangs. I swatted at them helplessly, watching as they latched on to my arms and neck, biting.

  “Hey!” Without thinking, I released a cloud of spectral butterflies, which tried valiantly to keep the tufts away from my eyes and nose. “Ling!”