The Catherine Lim Collection (18 page)

“I must say your powers of endurance are
remarkable, Angie,” said Mee Kin sympathetically.

“I’ve become inured to everything; there’s
no choice,” said the other. “Better to have her being nonsensical at home than
outside. I dread to think of what could have happened that day in Orchard Road.
Peace, peace, that’s all I ask. Even if it means stretching my nerves taut.”

Mooi Lan was having a nap; Angela was out
shopping, which accounted for the idiot one slipping in and going straight to
Michael’s room. Old Mother saw him and was happy, repeating, “Ah Bock, you’ve
come to see me,” but the idiot was eager to see Michael whose voice he had
heard. He bounded upstairs gurgling, and the boy laughed to see him, calling,
“Uncle Bock! Uncle Bock!”

“You’d better tell Uncle Bock to go away,”
said Michelle gravely, coming out of her room on hearing the commotion. “Mum
won’t like it; Mark won’t like it either, and he’s coming back from school any
moment now.”

But the idiot one and Michael were already
running downstairs hand in hand. They pranced about in the sitting room with
wild whoops of joy.

Michelle watched, a little nervously; she
clapped a hand to her mouth in a gasp of alarm as she saw Mooi Lan and Mark
walk in simultaneously. Mooi Lan was awakened from her nap by the uproar, Mark
had just returned from school and was about to go upstairs to his room. The
idiot was swinging Michael, his arms encircling the boy from behind. Both were
shouting with exuberance. “Again, Uncle Bock! Again, again!” screamed Michael
and the idiot, gurgling, lifted him up with a mighty heave, swung him in an arc
that felled, among other things, in its path, the trophy for the National
Speech contest. It crashed to the floor, the golden statuette, and lay in three
pieces, golden head detached from the body, the plaque with Mark’s name fallen
off from the base and lying face down.

Mark rushed up, white with rage. He stood
over the symbol of effort and victory, now destroyed, speechless, fists
clenched.

Uncle Bock was about to heave Michael for
another swing, still gleefully chortling, when Mark strode up and delivered a
stinging slap across the face of his younger brother. At the same time, the
tears sprang to his eyes.

“I hate you,” he cried, pale, quivering. “I
hate you all!” Then he ran upstairs to his room and slammed the door.

Old Mother picked up the pieces, clucking
her tongue, and put them back on the shelf. She went to Michael who stood still
as a statue, the tears filling his eyes, cheek burning from the slap and
sighed. “Never mind, Michael. You didn’t do it on purpose. You are a good boy.”
To the idiot who was looking around grinning for more sources of amusement, she
said, “Come, I’ll give you something to eat.”

Unable to reach Angela, Mooi Lan put a frantic
call to Boon at his clinic. By the time he returned, Angela had returned too,
and the incident in its every detail was recounted. She rushed up to Mark’s
room and knocked on the door, but it remained resolutely shut; Angela thought
she heard a suppressed sob. She ran down, examined the broken trophy.

“I’ll try to have it repaired,” she said and
broke out sobbing. Boon comforted her, dejected beyond words.

The three of
them
searched
hard
, searched frantically in the darkness for the small metal cylinder.
Uncle Bock’s strong arm plunged into the garbage bin and brought out fistfuls
of rubbish – but no metal cylinder.

“Are you sure your mother threw it here?”
asked Uncle Bock.

“Yes,” said Michael, his heart beating very
fast for fear of losing the precious object. “Yes, I saw her.”

“Look, there’s the moon coming up,” said
Grandmother. “I’ll talk to the Moon Goddess. She’ll lend us the light to look
for the cylinder.” Grandmother spoke to the Moon Goddess; the moon rose, large,
golden and filled the night with a warm glow so that in a moment Uncle Bock
exclaimed, “There! There it is! The red string’s still there!” He plunged his
arm into the garbage bin again and brought out, triumphantly, the red string
with the metal cylinder, intact, still dangling on it. Michael clapped his
hands for joy.

“Quick, put it round my neck, Grandma,” he
said. “Then I shall feel much better.” In an instant, the red string was back
round his neck, the cylinder once more safely hidden from view under his shirt,
but warmly, comfortably touching his chest.

The Moon Goddess passed; the shadows
gathered; a huge shadow disengaged itself and made for them. It descended upon
Michael, heavily. A ripping sound – the red string was once more torn from his
neck; the precious cylinder once more snatched away.

“You superstitious fool!” cried Mark, dark
with anger, and then he slapped Michael hard on the face before hurling the
cylinder through the darkness of night. It fell with a slight splash into dark
waters somewhere.

“Mark is right,” his mother said in a severe
voice. “You are very naughty and disobedient, Michael.” But he hardly heard,
for he was running, panting, towards the pond, where the cylinder had fallen.
Uncle Bock was running on one side, Grandmother on the other. “Go back to your
pond devils!” came the derisive call through the darkness.

Uncle Bock waded into the muddy depths now
black and menacing, not bright and golden with fish. Michael heard the splash,
splash, as Uncle Bock waded, groped, felt. He returned, empty-handed.

“And I can’t summon the Moon Goddess a
second time,” said Grandmother sadly.

“Follow me,” said Michael.

He led them back to the house; the room
seemed much bigger. It was lined with shelves. On the shelves stood the
glittering trophies.

“Destroy them,” cried Michael imperiously.
“Every single one of them.”

Uncle Bock flung something hard at one of
them, the largest, a golden statuette. The surrounding trophies crumbled around
it, like skittles. “Good! Good!” cried Michael and he himself with a mighty
sweep of his arm, sent crashing to the floor yet more trophies.

A shadow again detached itself from the
shelves – or two shadows. “Punish them, punish them all for doing all this to
me,” cried Mark to a huge, black-cloaked man whom Michael recognised to be the
magician of the birthday party, sinister of mien and gesture. He caught hold of
Uncle Bock, locked him with one powerful arm and with the other materialised
from the air a sharp shining knife.

“No, please, no!” cried Michael terrified,
and then he was being pulled away by his grandmother. They ran and ran, and
looking back, were relieved to see Uncle Bock running a short distance behind.
How had he managed to break free from the magician’s grip?

They cowered in Grandmother’s room before
the altar with Grandfather’s framed photograph on the wall.

“Grandpa will protect us,” said Grandmother.
She had one arm around Michael, the other around Uncle Bock. Michael felt the
smoothness of her jade bangle on his cheek.

“Your bangle’s turned all green now, Grandma,”
he whispered. “Look, it’s all green! That means we’re safe, we’re free from all
of them!”

“You’re right, little grandson,” said
Grandmother.

“I hope they never take you away, Grandma,”
said Michael sadly; but even as he spoke, they had arrived and were taking old
grandmother away.

“No! No! No! No!” cried the boy frantically,
trying to resist the captors. He had knocked down, not the captor’s sharp
knife, but a thermometer; it fell off the doctor’s hand and broke on the floor.
This he saw when he opened his eyes.

“How are you, Michael my boy? Feeling
better, I hope?” said Dr Wong, sitting beside him on his bed and smiling down
at him. He turned his head slightly, and saw his father and mother.

“Mikey, darling – ” said his mother, moving
towards him, but he closed his eyes, suddenly feeling very drowsy again. He
dropped off into an uneasy stupor, but he could hear the voices around him
quite distinctly.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be all right,” he heard
Dr Wong say. “A case of nerves. Keep him quiet. He’ll be all right. What about
Mark?”

“Oh, he’s all right now, doctor,” said his
mother. “He’s gone off with the school band to Hong Kong. We thought the break
would do him good. He’ll be away about a week.”

“I’m afraid she must go,” said Dr Wong
gravely. “Her presence seems to have had a very disturbing influence on the
children. Let her go away for a while, while the children recover. And on no
condition must Ah Bock come near Michael now.”

“Yes, doctor!” said his mother with a sob.

The letter had a reproachful tone throughout.
Angela could hardly curb her indignation: the perusal was punctuated with cries
of ‘What cheek!’ ‘Who does he think he is to be talking like this to me?’ and
‘Fanatic’, ‘Hypocrite’.

‘Sister Angela’ – he had started calling her
Sister Angela ever since he joined the sect that made them all brothers and
sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ.

It began with salutations, with a litany of
blessings, for he, the worker for Christ, was now the receptacle from which the
Lord’s graces could be liberally drawn upon to touch the lives of the less
privileged, but the salutations quickly gave way to severe reproach.

It has come to my attention that you, the most
intelligent of my family, the one through whom I was hoping to use to draw the
rest of the family to the Saviour, are yourself guilty of those very practices
of evil that I had hoped to see vanquished forever from the midst of my family.
What hope is left when the one who had shown great promise becomes like the
rest, engulfed by the powers of evil?

What on earth is he talking about? thought
Angela, her pulse quickening. Me engulfed by evil? What on earth does he mean,
that fanatic?

It has come to my attention that you, my dear
Sister, dabble in the forces of evil. You have consulted astrologers, the very
agents of the Prince of Darkness, who unleash confusion upon the world, and you
have consulted a geomancer for pure material gain. (I didn’t know Dorothy’s
brother was such a gossip, thought Angela angrily. He must have told Wee Siong
all this.)

Let me tell you, my dear Sister in Christ
(Fanatic! Will you stop calling me this? I’ve no wish to be allied to your mad
religion!), that fortune-tellers, astrologers, temple mediums and so on, are
the very means by which the enemies of Christ hope to destroy the world. By
going to them, you have denied the Lord His power of love and healing. He
offers you bread; you cast that aside for a viper. Allying yourself with these
agents of iniquity, you are erecting a wall between yourself and salvation.

Sister Angela, I know of the problems at home,
and they grieve me. They grieve me not because you, Mother and the rest of the
family have suffered. They grieve me because, instead of turning to the Lord,
you turn to the Iniquitous One for help. I had thought, my dear Sister, that
you were the most sensible, the one most open to the Lord’s grace. (Ah, the
fanatic is trying to flatter me now!) I trust you more than my own brothers who
are now too much embroiled in materialistic pursuits for their hearts to be
open to the Lord Jesus Christ, But you, my dear Sister – remember the many
conversations we used to have? I had much faith in you then (What conversations
is that idiot referring to?). Now it fills me with sorrow to learn that you
have gone the way of the others, chosen the Path of Corruption instead of the
Path of Faith and Love that the Lord Jesus Christ offered you through me, His
humble agent. (If you mean those sickening pamphlets and booklets, they’ve
ended up in the trash-basket.)

Sister Angela, of what good is it to lose your
salvation for a miserable bit of money by seeking the assistance of the powers
of evil? (Miserable bit of money! I’ll have you know, you hypocrite, that
because of the geomancer, your brother’s business is flourishing, and he’s in a
better position to be host to his parasitic family, including you!) Now I learn
that Old Mother has gone to stay with Gloria. Now Sister Gloria, through no
fault of her own, is in a religion that is all darkness and superstition.
Popism has foisted upon our poor Sister and millions like her, corrupt
practices involving images, rosaries, statues and a whole host of abominable
objects designed to confuse and block out the Truth and the Light. Old Mother’s
going to live with Gloria will mean that in addition to the burden of
superstition that has been her lot for so long, she is now going to be touched
by agents in other perhaps more sinister guises. (Now I don’t understand this.
Is Gloria not a Christian, too? What’s the matter with you Christians?) I was
hoping, my dear Sister Angela, that when I returned, I would be able to rescue
my family from the evil they have fallen into; all the family problems that
have happened are surely the result of this evil. (My dear young man, you have
contributed greatly to the problems. How much have you squandered of family
money so far? A hundred thousand?)

But now I find that with you abandoning your
faith and trust in the Lord’s love and mercy to go the way of the others
(Whenever did I have this ‘faith’ and ‘trust’?), my work of saving my family
for the Lord Jesus Christ will be much harder. But I am not one to flinch from
the call of the Lord. The Lord wants me to return, after I have finished my
work in this country, and lead my family to Him. From my family, I will go on
to bring the message of salvation to others. The Lord calls; I cannot ignore
His cries. He has saved me from a life of sin and iniquity, and I am now fully
restored to His love and mercy. (Don’t bring the poor Lord in. Your Australian
divorcee was found in bed with another man and you kicked her out).