The Catherine Lim Collection (14 page)

“I ... I ...” he stuttered. Then tears
filled his eyes. His mother thought, For God’s sake, when will it end? When can
I remove him from her influence? But now she smiled with an enormous effort and
said, “Never mind, Michael darling. Mummy will help you with the spelling
tomorrow morning, before school. Will that be okay, darling?”

Old fool, she thought. You started telling
your old fool’s stories and now you’ve made one son angry and the other
confused. When will it end?

“We should
go to the police,
he deserves to be locked up,” said
Angela angrily. She held the crying girl in her arms.

She would relive the girl’s night – or
nights – of terror many times in her imagination. The drunken lurching, the use
of force in full view, of six or seven younger siblings huddled together,
pretending to sleep in the dank darkness of the atap hut, the whimpering
protestations of the mother, pale and weak, just home from the hospital after
giving birth.

“No!” The eyes dilated with horror,
pleading. “No! No!”

Police investigation would mean shame, loss
of his job, loss of her job, misery all round. “No, mem. Please, mem, no
police.” The pleading of the mother was pathetic.

“How many months now, Sharifah?” asked
Angela gently. “Three or four,” said the girl, now no longer sobbing but
sitting quietly, eyes on the floor. “Not too late,” said Angela to Mooi Lan.
“It can be done. You told me your sister had it done in her fourth month.”

“Why don’t you ask Doctor? He should know.
He’s a doctor,” said the girl, not wishing to talk about her sister.

“No. I won’t involve him in this. It’s too
nasty. I’ll see what I can do at the government hospital.”

Only months later was Angela able to tell
Mee Kin, and only then because Mee Kin said, “You’re lucky to have such a
faithful washerwoman as your Minah. Mine steals and tells lies.”

“Oh, you don’t know the trouble I’ve had
from her,” said Angela with a sigh, and then she told the story. Sharifah was
well again after only a week and went back to work. She had herself gone to see
the wretched man – given him a severe lecture, and threatened police action
should anything like that happen again.

She had not told Boon. He would have
disapproved of her action; he frowned upon anything that smacked of scandal,
even if it were only remotely connected to him or his household –
understandably, Angela explained, because of the possible offer to stand as
Member of Parliament. A politician had to be ever so careful. Nothing even
hinting of impropriety. So she had not told him, but had gone ahead with her
actions, compassion again guiding her conduct. “I’ve arranged for Minah’s
ligation,” she told Mee Kin with a sigh, “and I hope that’s the end of trouble
from that drunken beast.”

Mee Kin said, “You were very brave to go to
him. Suppose he had gone berserk and hacked you with a parang? Don’t smile,
Angela, that’s a possibility. You can’t tell with these people.”

“I’m not stupid,” said Angela and smiled
again. “He’s not the dangerous sort – only a drunken lecher. He was smiling and
apologising profusely all the time I was there, scratching his armpits. I
wasn’t afraid. I know the type.”

While Minah was at home recovering from the
birth of her baby, Sharifah came over to take her place and do the washing and
daily mopping.

Mooi Lan took her aside. She asked in
whispers, glancing to see that Angela was not around. “What was it like?” She
giggled.

Sharifah looked down, pained, red-faced.
“Have you slept with men before?” she persisted. “I had a boyfriend,” said
Sharifah after much coaxing. “But he left me when he found out.”

“Did you sleep with him?” The girl did not
answer. “Was he handsome?” The girl smiled faintly.

“He was good-looking. He looked like Hussein
Ali.”

Hussein Ali was a well-known star in the
Malay TV programmes.

“Dr Toh is very good-looking, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” said Sharifah, and she
turned her back to Mooi Lan, not wanting to talk any more.

“I think he’s very good-looking,” said Mooi
Lan, taking a cookie from a cookie jar and munching it.

She leant on the kitchen table on her
elbows, her arms brought close together, and she looked down with sly
satisfaction at her young firm breasts, pushed together almost into bursting
roundness by her arms. She smiled again.

It was the
third time
that Mooi Lan had swept the floor that day.
That was four times altogether including the first sweeping in the morning by
Sharifah. Mooi Lan went down on her knees and picked out, one by one, the stray
strands of thread where these had become entangled in the soft tufts of carpet
and could not be reached by broom or vacuum cleaner. The girl picked them up
patiently, rolled them into a ball, dropped these into the dustpan and resumed
sweeping.

Angela apologised – apologised for the old
one’s untidiness. Another malady of dotage – the endless making of patchwork
blankets that left trails of thread and small pieces of cloth all over the
floor. She was making a patchwork blanket presumably for Wee Tiong’s son. She
had made a patchwork blanket for each of her grandchildren.

Crude, hideous things, thought Angela; the
three patchwork blankets for her three children had lain in the camphor linen
chest for years. They simply could not go with the furniture and pictures and
colour scheme of the children’s bedrooms.

Angela watched Mooi Lan sweeping up the tiny
bits of thread and cloth, and realised that since the old one’s arrival, the
girl had become less communicative, even sullen.

I really must get someone to help out with
the work; she’s finding it difficult to cope, thought Angela. She had raised
Mooi Lan’s wages on the very month of Old Mother’s arrival, but she knew wage
increases made no difference to Mooi Lan. The girl had been with them four
years now, and had become part of the family. It would be extremely difficult
to replace her.

“Who turned off the flame? My medicine isn’t
properly brewed,” said Old Mother sharply, going into the kitchen where an
earthen pot bubbled with black brew, emitting a strong pungent smell. She
looked accusingly at Mooi Lan.

“Who turned off the flame?” she demanded
again. Mooi Lan said nothing and continued washing some plates at the sink.

“You are very disrespectful,” she said
severely, shaking a finger at the girl. “You show no respect to an old woman.”

She lit the cooker gas-ring again and left
the kitchen. In a few minutes, the black brew bubbled over, spilling down the
sides of the earthen pot and on to the white gleaming top of the cooker. Mooi
Lan ran out of the kitchen to call Angela.

“Her brew’s spilling over, but she won’t let
me turn off the flame,” cried the girl with restrained exasperation. “I’ve just
cleaned the cooker, but the stuff is spilling again.”

Angela got up in weary vexation and turned
off the flame; the bubbling ceased, but the cooker top was a mess. She called
Old Mother who was upstairs in her room, in a voice shrill with irritation.
“Mother! Your medicine’s boiled already! It’s spilling over!”

Old Mother came down slowly. Mooi Lan
cleaned up the mess again. The smell of the obnoxious brew lingered in the
kitchen for hours.

“I wonder why she keeps brewing and
brewing,” cried Angela in exasperation. “Does she take all that nasty stuff?
What’s it supposed to cure?”

“She gives Michael some of the brew,” said
Mooi Lan slowly. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“What – ” almost shrieked Angela. “She makes
Michael take the nasty stuff – whatever it is – without consulting me? How many
times has she done it, Mooi Lan? Why didn’t you tell me?”

The girl remained silent, and grew more
sullen. Angela understood what she was going through, with the old one in the
house.

“Mother, you have been giving Michael your
Chinese medicine,” said Angela with great restraint. “Why do you give him the
medicine? What illness does he have?”

“The boy is unwell,” said Old Mother. “The
medicine will cure him of his illness, strengthen him.”

“Mother,” said Angela with a patience that
surprised herself, “Michael’s father is a doctor. He knows what Michael needs.
We have the necessary vitamin pills to make him strong. Don’t trouble yourself
in the future. Let me take care of Michael.”

“The herbal brews – what were the
ingredients? What had poor Michael been ingesting?” She remembered having seen
the contents for a brew, wrapped in pink paper – dried weird things that looked
like bits of bark, dried flowers, worm casts. She remembered Boon had told her
– in the communicative days of courtship – that his mother once cured the
swollen, infected ear of a neighbour’s child by putting a cockroach’s fresh
entrails into it. Ah Siew Chae, an old servant now dead, stemmed the flow of
blood from a deep cut in her son’s foot by applying joss ash on it.

And the baby mice – she had been told about
the baby mice by Old Mother herself, and for a long time, the mere recollection
of the incident made her want to run to the bathroom. The idiot one had fallen
from a rambutan tree and had sustained injuries to his back. Old Mother sought
a cure for him. She gave him small pellets of salted vegetable leaves and told
him to swallow each - swallow, not bite. Each pellet was really a new-born
furless mouse wrapped round with a salted vegetable leaf. The idiot one
swallowed six baby mice in all, and, according to Old Mother and Ah Kum Soh,
never had any backache since.

Old Mother’s herbal brews were in her very
house, swallowed by her own son! It was inconceivable, intolerable.

Angela fought back angry tears.

“You go into Michael’s room when the boy is
asleep,” said Mooi Lan slyly, “and you look at what he’s wearing round his
neck.”

Angela turned the key in the boy’s room
softly and walked to the sleeping form curled up foetally. She had with her a
tiny pencil torch which she used to search for the offensive object. She
gasped, then with great energy, easily removed it from the boy’s neck by
snipping off the red string. The little metal cylinder rolled off the bed.
Angela bent down and picked it up quickly, and removed the red string from
round her son’s neck. She held the object tightly in her hand, breathing
heavily. The boy stirred in his sleep, moaning a little. “Oh, my poor Mikey – ”
She wanted to hold him close, but left the room instead, panting with
agitation. She paused, wondering whether to fling the hateful thing back at Old
Mother or simply throw it away. She decided to get rid of it by throwing it
into the garbage bin in front of the house.

“How horrible, how horrible,” she repeated.
“Poor Mikey. No wonder he’s like that. I wonder what other charms she’s got for
him. I must do something about this.”

Getting to be a pig-sty, as I predicted, she
thought in weary resignation as she passed Old Mother’s room and peeped in to
see a massing of boxes and paper bags on the floor. Why ever did I bring her
here? She’s a real thorn in my side, a huge thorn that goes deep into the
flesh.

She passed Mark’s room and heard him
practising for the National Speech contest. The serpent has bitten, she thought
bitterly. Its tooth goes deep and the poison spreads all round.

If she
forgot about that dream
– or was it more than a dream,
was it a vision of some kind? - the bed would be a source of pleasure, not
terror.

There it had stood, in the master bedroom, a
masterpiece of craftsmanship and impeccable taste (the silken maroon
bed-curtains had caused those handsomely carved creatures on the posts to stand
out even more impressively). But now the workmen were here, to take it away to
the home of a Mrs Daisy Perez – probably some vulgar rich woman who would
clutter the bed with garish silk cushions. The cheque for $5,500 did nothing to
still the pain. Angela instructed Mooi Lan to keep an eye on the workmen and
see that they did not spoil the wallpaper in the bedroom or knock down any
potted plant or ornament on their way down. Pained beyond expression by the
loss of the bed, Angela retired to the spare bedroom, where she sat down
heavily on the bed, wondering what explanation to give Mee Kin or Dorothy when
they came and found the bed gone. The dream – it was definitely more than a
dream – Angela put the blame squarely on her mother-in-law and that weird old
servant Ah Kheem Chae, now dead, and then the dream had lost much of its
terror. Her mother-in-law had told her this story – it must have been in the
early years of her marriage before the old one developed the habit of long
bouts of sullenness, broken only by querulous complaints. Her mother-in-law’s
grand-uncle was very rich, the richest man in a town in China. He had
insatiable lust, and had to have a woman in his bed every night, well into his
75th year.

All the numerous maid-servants in the big
stone house with the three courtyards, he had deflowered at one time or other,
except the old or the ugly, pock-marked ones or the ones known to have disease,
for Grand-Uncle was meticulous about his health. He had his three wives brew
cleansing herbs for him to ingest or soak in, and one night, in bed, he took a
14-year-old virgin by force and she died of the pain and shock. They removed
her bleeding body and buried her quietly, but her ghost returned to haunt
Grand-Uncle repeatedly. He became impotent, then mad, then one night, hacked
the bed to pieces. It was a massive, carved, four-poster, but he asked for an
axe and chopped it up. After that, he was more subdued, but died shortly after,
in his 77th year.