The Catherine Lim Collection (15 page)

Angela forgot the context in which this
piece of family history was unravelled; perhaps her mother-in-law wanted to
share with her her contempt for men, for had she not always called her husband
the ‘Old Devil’, ‘One-who-is-accursed-with-short-life’, ‘One-who-is-more
lecherous-than-the-farmyard-rooster,’ the last being a condemnation of his having
two mistresses at the same time during a period of relative prosperity.

Angela could not remember the context, but
the details stood out vividly, screamingly; the torn body of the 14-year-old
haunted her imagination ever afterwards. Once she asked her mother-in-law
whether there was any picture of the grand-uncle. There was none, but Angela
eventually tracked down an album of old, yellowing photographs belonging to her
mother-in-law’s relative. When shown the picture of the grand-uncle, she
gasped, “He looks exactly as I imagined him to be – obese, flabby, even down to
the mole with the long hairs drooping from it. Now how on earth did I think of
a mole with long hairs? It’s weird, isn’t it?”

Boon said she must have seen the photograph
somewhere before, she insisted that was not possible. She became excited,

she wished there were a picture of the
14-year-old bondmaid to match with the girl in her imagination, but of course,
bondmaids had no photographs.

“She was a pretty, slight girl with hair
parted in the middle and worn in two long plaits, one at the back and one
always falling down her shoulders in front. She had big soft-looking eyes,
rather like Mooi Lan’s, and a small mouth. On the night she was torn to death
by the pain and fright, her eyes were even larger, they couldn’t close her eyes
for a full hour after death.”

“Darling, you’re morbid, you ought to be a
writer of crime fiction!” teased her husband and Angela laughed with him.

“My elder sister,” said the mournful Ah
Kheem Chae (again Angela could not remember when it was she had told the
story), “my elder sister was murdered just a few minutes after she was born. A
baby girl, they said. That’s no good. There was the tray of ash in readiness on
the table, in case it was a girl; the baby girl, naked and squalling, was
lifted, taken to the tray and her face turned into the ash. A short struggle,
and it was over. They wrapped her in rags and buried her, not in secrecy of
night, but unashamedly, in the openness of daylight. Another girl, said the
neighbours sympathetically, for they too had smothered, or seen smothered, baby
girls in their time. When my mother gave birth to me, somehow she didn’t want
me killed. She said, ‘let’s keep this baby girl. Throw away that tray of ash.’”

It couldn’t have been on a carved
four-poster like this. It must have been on a plank bed with no mattress, and a
block of wood for a pillow. Or there was no bed; the woman panting and heaving,
probably squatted over a basin of warm water on the ground. Then why do I
connect this atrocity with an antique bed? Angela thought, puzzled.

The day the antique bed arrived from the
restorer’s workshop, she was delighted. “It’s worth a small fortune,” cooed Mee
Kin surveying it with envy, and Angela said, “No. How can I ever think of selling
it? It’s such a beauty!” She let her fingers feel the richness of the carved
posts, trace the scales on the serpent’s bodies.

And then the strange dreams.

She heard the 14-year-old’s moans of pain as
the old but lusty body heaved on her. She heard, saw the red rips of pain in
the 14-year-old flesh, saw the small fragile body fall limp to the floor, saw
her mother-in-law come in to remove the stained sheets; how did Old Mother come
into the picture? Grand-Uncle lay panting on the bed, in naked corpulence. He
let out a loud guffaw, scratched his armpits in easeful indolence – he seemed
then to be wearing a sarong and singlet. It was that drunken lecher, Minah’s
husband.

“Come,” he said, pulling Sharifah to the
bed, “come.” The girl whimpered, powerless. The short, sharp gasps of pain
mingled with the sensual grunts, and then he dissolved and reformed before her
very eyes. Now he was her father-in-law lying on his back, abusing her
mother-in-law and hitting her on the head with his walking stick, and then he was
Minah’s useless husband again, scratching his armpits and sucking his teeth –
no, he was the lustful Grand-Uncle with the mole and the long hairs drooping
from it.

The blue-striped Arrow shirt that she had
herself bought for him – the voice, the laugh – it was Boon now; she saw her
own husband on the bed with the 14-year-old bondmaid, but she was giggling, not
moaning in pain. They were propped up on the elbows, close to each other; he
touched her breasts, pushed together by her young firm arms into bursting
roundness as she moved closer to him, still propped up on her elbows. She
giggled – Angela recognised Mooi Lan’s peculiar giggle – an improper one for
women, her mother-in-law used to remark – a kind of low, sensual gurgle. She
saw the two of them locked in pleasure and then she heard them conspiring in
whispers. “Let’s kill the child; let’s smother her in the tray of ash,” and
with a deft flick of his hand, Boon turned the newborn infant’s face into the
ash, and quietened her at last. Then the giggle again.

The horror – oh, the horror –

She saw herself rushing forward in her rage.
“You beasts,” she screamed and then stood back. The grand-uncle turned
quizzically towards her, naked from the waist downwards; and barely visible,
under his enormous bulk, the face of a very young girl, but not the 14-year-old
virgin. One small white arm reached out to cling tightly to one of the four
posts with the carved serpent, to be the better able to endure the pain in her
flesh.

“What – ” exclaimed Grand-Uncle in annoyance
at the interruption. She stood rooted to the spot, gasping in terror, and then
the serpent on the post unwound itself and slid towards her, bare-fanged. There
was a guffaw of malicious delight from Grand-Uncle. She fled from the room,
sobbing.

It was not an isolated dream. It repeated
itself three times, with slight changes of detail, but always there was the
horror, the blood, the pain of her husband naked with a young girl.

Those weird stories, thought Angela with
exasperation. I’ll never listen to them again. And I won’t allow the poor
children to listen to them and have nightmares.

She sold the bed shortly after.

“Life has
its compensations,”
Angela told Mee Kin on the phone.
She had told her friend, in an hour-long chat, of the recent traumatic
experiences – Michael, the old one, the idiot foster-son, how they had caused
her to suffer intensely. The knife had plunged in and twisted. The beautiful
antique bed – the old one’s pernicious influence had touched even there. She
told Mee Kin of the frightful dreams. She sometimes heard Michael cry out in
his sleep: the old one’s tales harmed the poor boy too. And the idiot one. He
had tried once again to see Michael, his capacity for causing embarrassment and
distress was endless, and Mooi Lan had had a difficult time getting rid of him
with the neighbours looking on. But life has its compensations, and here Angela
brightened up, and began to speak with affectionate enthusiasm of Mark.

Mark had won the coveted National Speech
trophy, receiving it from the Minister of Education himself, amidst thunderous
applause. The television cameras caught the boy at his best, first reciting a
poem in Mandarin on the theme of filial piety, and then following it up by the
speech from Shakespeare, which he had practised to perfection. There was no
doubt, from the very start, that the trophy would go to him; the other
contestants were almost pathetic beside him.

The cameras swept, fleetingly, over Boon and
Angela, glowingly proud parents, sitting in the front row. Angela had had the
television programme video-taped, and she showed it to every visitor. Mark was
posed beside the trophy, a handsome gold-plated statuette, for a picture that
would join the row of framed photographs on a special shelf in the sitting
room, of the boy in the various stages of his school life, receiving trophies,
certificates, making speeches. The trophy itself joined the other trophies on
another shelf, but it had pride of place; it stood tall and handsome in the
centre, proclaiming the boy’s supreme achievement. Angela herself dusted the
various trophies every few days. There was going to be a special shelf for
Michelle too; her trophies for swimming were increasing. Angela had also bought
a special album for the cuttings of newspaper reports about Mark and Michelle.
There was a big write-up in The Straits Times on the competition, accompanied
by a picture of Mark, tall and handsome and dignified-looking, receiving the
trophy from the Minister of Education who beamed at the boy in congratulatory
warmth. There was another write-up on Mark in the New Nation: Mark was
interviewed by a reporter who went to his school. He answered all her questions
competently, impressively. She called Mark ‘a self-assured young man with
definite ideas about what he wants to be and what he wants to do’. Michelle had
had her share of fame; there was a write-up on her after she did brilliantly in
an inter-school swimming competition and the sports editor called her ‘very
promising’ and ‘a swimmer with vast potential whom it would be very interesting
to watch.’ Then there was the article in the ‘Trends’ section of The Straits
Times, in which the reporter wrote generally about the trend to have children’s
parties in hotels but highlighted Mark’s 15th birthday celebration. There were
two pictures, one showing the boy blowing out the candles on his cake, and the
other showing the guests watching the magic show.

It was an album that Angela invariably
brought out to show visitors. It was too early to talk about it, and Mark
wouldn’t want her to talk about it, but it was clear that he was one of those
being marked out for the elite college that the government was thinking of
starting for exceptionally bright students in secondary school, to groom them
for future leadership. If a second echelon leadership were already visible, a
third echelon was obviously being thought about and discussed. There was talk
of a big beautiful college being built, with surroundings conducive to the full
development of these bright young eager minds.

Life need not be so dreadful after all,
thought Angela with a sigh. There was something else that was a compensation,
that lightened the burden somewhat on her chest, but this Angela kept from Mee
Kin, being happy to talk chiefly of Mark and Michelle.

She had gone to see an astrologer about
Boon. Boon had been depressed lately, and Angela had heard from a colleague
that there was a very good astrologer in Leigh Road, a really qualified man,
quite unlike the half-baked fortune tellers and self-proclaimed astrologers
that were so numerous in Singapore. This astrologer, it was well known, was
consulted by some of the top brass in the government. A Minister of the Indonesian
government, it was said, flew in periodically to consult him. Even the
expatriate community in Singapore, top professionals and men in business, were
guided by him in their decisions.

His fees were enormous, but that was no
problem. Indeed, Angela told the colleague, that was an indication of his worth
and she was most skeptical of those fortune tellers who were content to charge
a miserable $10 or $20 per session.

Angela went with the colleague to see the
astrologer; he was Sri Lankan, and he spoke flawless English. Besides, his
office was air-conditioned and handsomely carpeted, the walls covered by
impressive-looking astrological charts.

Angela gave him Boon’s date and time of
birth. She was astonished at his ability to tell her about her husband’s past.
He sounded a warning; he said her husband was too kind and credulous for his
own good, and Angela nodded her head in vigorous agreement. Boon, said the
astrologer, was going through a bad period. Indeed, his fortunes were at an
ebb, would continue to be low till his star gained ascendancy, some time
towards the end of the year, after which they would improve, would improve
remarkably in every area – in business, in his political ambitions, in his
emotional and spiritual state. Angela was elated. She did not tell Boon, but
she became less worried for him.

The same colleague had a friend who had a
big share in a hotel. The hotel was doing badly, and the friend brought in a
geomancer from Hong Kong, who took a good look at the building and decided that
the entrance to the hotel lobby was wrongly aligned, with the result that it
kept luck away.

Upon the geomancer’s advice, the hotel
re-aligned the entrance. Architecturally, it was quaint and wrong, but business
boomed almost immediately.

“Next time you pass the hotel, look
carefully at the doorway,’ said the friend. ‘It’s wonderful what a little
adjustment can do.”

The geomancer was being flown into Singapore
again, this time by the owners of a hotel about to be built.

“Looking at him,” said the colleague, “you
wouldn’t know he was a geomancer. We tend to think of these people as old and
weird-looking. He is always impeccably dressed in suit and tie, though he
speaks no English. He insists on being put up in the best hotel, and his fees
are astronomical.”

Angela spoke to Boon about the possible
services of this geomancer for the Restaurant Haryati. It was practically on
the verge of being closed down; why not try to save it? Since the geomancer
would be in Singapore, they might as well avail themselves of the opportunity.
Boon had no objection.