Miss Seetoh in the World (18 page)

She was turning more and more to the world
of her imagination for solace, to balance the bleakness of the reality. There
was a price to pay; the imagination sometimes spilled over into the dreams at
night and heightened the terror.

She was somewhere in the Botanic Gardens, in
a secluded spot hidden from sight by bushes and trees. ‘That’s a nice nightie
you have on,’ said Dr Phang, and he made to touch the lacy straps on her
shoulders. ‘Why, you’re crying. Tell me,’ he said gently and laid her head on
his shoulder. ‘It must be that Bernard. He’s such a pain in the ass. You are
completely mismatched. I saw that in Cameron Highlands, on the first day of
your honeymoon. Do you plan to leave him?’

She said, ‘I can’t! I can’t!’

‘Why not?’ he demanded, but she could only
continue weeping and repeat, ‘I can’t!’

He bent down to kiss her. ‘You know, beneath
all that docile exterior lies so much unused love. You were never meant for a
life of solitude, my dear.’

They heard the sound of approaching
footsteps. Bernard was shouting, ‘Alright, come out, wherever you are. I’ve
caught you. I’ve got grounds for divorce now. Caught you in the act, you bitch,
you slut!’ For she was standing before him, naked, the lingerie on the grass.

‘Who was that with you?’ He pulled somebody
out of the bushes, yelling triumphantly, ‘Got you! I knew it was you all along.
I’ll set the police on you for seducing my wife.’

‘Yes, go ahead, you bastard,’ said Brother
Philip, also naked. ‘She came to me for comfort because you never gave her
any!’ and knocked him to the ground.

His dreams which he never told her must have
had their own share of terrors; she would wake up suddenly to long drawn-out
groans, incoherent bits of angry conversation, an arm suddenly flung out in the
darkness, and would instantly sit up to soothe him, stroking his forehead,
rubbing his chest, bringing him a cup of hot water, whispering calming words
into his ears, as to a child in delirium. Kindness was no substitute for love
either, and retreated at once if mistaken for passion.

As soon as he sat up, looked around,
realised it was only a bad dream and saw his wife beside him, all gentle
solicitousness, he would break into something like a sob and pull her towards
him in a return of hope and yearning, and she would inwardly recoil, in a
return of guilt and desperation. It was an impossible situation they were in,
the dreams at night being now an extension of their torments by day. Through
her own fault, she had become the best exemplar of that warning about marrying
in haste and repenting at leisure: only the haste she had married in had
nothing to do with passion, and the long, grey vistas stretching endlessly
ahead were not of repentance, since she had done nothing wrong, but of regret
for an act of sheer folly and stupidity.

On the first anniversary of their marriage,
he said with a wry smile, ‘Why don’t we give each other the best anniversary
present ever?’

She dreaded the sarcasms that often followed
the statements or the questions delivered with slow deliberateness for effect.
‘Why don’t we see a marriage counsellor, since we’re going nowhere?’

She knew his pride and sensitivity would
never allow a full unburdening of secrets, whether to strangers or family,
whether to professional counsellors or close friends. Only his sharp-eyed Third
Aunt, on a visit sixth months into their marriage had pulled her aside to say,
in a poignantly brave attempt at English, ‘My Ah Siong. He so thin. He not
happy. You got take care of him?’

He liked to come up with unusual statements
and suggestions for the sole purpose of provoking a reply from her, of breaking
into her long silences: ‘Why aren’t you pregnant yet? Maybe the fault’s all on
my side. Why don’t we seek medical help? Should we think of adopting?’

She wondered why desperately unhappy women
continued to stay on in their marriages, and concluded that it was not the oft
claimed folly or lack of self-esteem. It was simple calculation: every unhappy
woman had an abacus in her head in which she constantly did the sums of gain
and loss, of continuing in the marriage or walking out. The most daunting cost
lay in taking the initiative: suddenly she would have to face and justify her
decision, not only to her husband but the entire support system of relatives,
friends, colleagues, fellow church members. When a woman married, it was not
just to an individual but a whole community. Even the much steeled woman would
quail before the hideous prospect of facing the shock and disapproval,
disappointment and sorrow of such a force whose first duty would be to argue
her down and help her save her marriage. Think of your children, they would
urge. Think of this. Think of that. What would people say.

Then of course there was the question of
money. She had heard of couples who continued to be under the same roof because
they could not afford another. One couple had had separate bedrooms for
decades, communicating through their two children or notes stuck on doors.

In the end, it was easier for an unhappy
woman to simply give up and resign herself to her lot in life. Taking stock of
that lot, she could improve it in small ways – focusing on the children, going
out more with her girlfriends, taking up community work. One woman she knew
took up mah-jong and in the end came to rely completely on its compensatory
solace. The tiny light at the end of a very long blistering tunnel would come
when the children were grown up, started working and give her the financial
independence she needed from her husband. But by that time, she would be an old
woman, like the poor woman who suffered for thirty years in her marriage and
revealed the truth in the sorrowful inscription on her tombstone: ‘She died at
thirty, and was buried at sixty.’

The daunting problems of children and money
were not hers, yet there was no lightening of the heaviness of heart. Maria
thought sadly: I would have no support whatsoever in my decision. Do I have the
strength to stand all alone? An act of adultery, constant abuse, wastrel
habits, a serious dereliction of husbandly duty – all these would be
comprehensible because they were in the expected order of things, and be given
due consideration. But lovelessness?

‘Why, Maria,’ everyone would exclaim,
‘you’re such a good, loving wife, always tending to your husband’s needs. And
Bernard’s such a good husband. Anyone can see he loves you with his whole heart
and soul!’

Her mother would be hysterical: ‘Are you
mad? He bought this apartment for you! He doesn’t drink, gamble or womanise.
You are his whole world. Do you know how many women would be glad to have
Bernard as their husband? Why must you be so difficult?’

The owl’s cry in the dead of night – she had
heard it only once as a child, and it had remained a terror ever since, despite
the weaning from the ancestral superstitions starting from the girlhood years
in school, despite even the strong, enlightened stance of reason in adulthood.
In the morning her mother asked her, then the maid, if they too had heard it,
to confirm the final sign in a long series of an imminent death in the house.

Por Por had not been behaving like herself,
a welcome sign only in the case of very old and sick people, that their release
was in sight. Watching Por Por suddenly becoming quiet and subdued, sitting by
herself in dark corners for long hours, she remembered the many tales she had
heard – of the kindly, gentle old neighbour, aged eighty, who turned nasty and
cursed everyone in the household for a whole week before he died, of the nasty
mother-in-law who suddenly stopped scolding her long-suffering daughter-in-law
and died actually holding the young woman’s hand. It was as if they needed to
give warning of their approaching death in the most conspicuous way possible –
a total reversal of personality and temperament. External signs like the owl’s
cry, a sudden discharge of scent into the air of pale nocturnal flowers, even
the sound of knuckles knocking on coffins, were all but secondary warnings.

She bent down and looked into Por Por’s
face, offered to take her shopping, to the playground, to the White Heaven
Temple, and watched in dismay as the old woman silently and resolutely shook
her head, like a dispirited child, to each offer. Bernard, whose kindness in
searching for and bringing her grandmother back home almost three years ago she
would never forget, joined her in trying to break through the thick silence
that the old one had wrapped round herself, like a warm, comforting blanket.
Both were able, just for a while, to step out of their world of silent
conflict, growing more fearful by the day, to stand side by side as a pair in a
unity of concern and compassion for another.

The pleasant thought was interrupted by a
sombre one: could tension between two persons in a household spread outwards,
like a dark and pestilential cloud, to infect others? Could even very young
children in their cribs and cradles succumb to slow, silently spreading adult
poison?

She spoke about the owl’s cry to Bernard,
and he dismissed it, as he regularly dismissed the superstitions of elderly
relatives like his Third Aunt, as just so much of the traditional nonsense
forbidden by the Church. Nowadays he turned every statement, every question, no
matter how innocuous, into yet one more painful reminder of the hopelessness of
their marriage, a continuing supply of fuel for an angry furnace that needed to
be fed constantly. She waited with weary resignation and it came as expected,
accompanied by a bitter laugh: if the owl’s cry was a sign of his impending
death, it would be no bad thing. She thought grimly: wallowing in self-pity
only made a person sink deeper in the regard of others.

She wondered how much her memory had been
influenced by her ever active imagination to fix permanently in her mind the
recollection of a little girl who had died the morning after an owl’s cry was
heard. The girl and her mother had rented part of a room in a large rundown
house with many rooms, endlessly partitioned by a greedy landlord, to take in
as many as possible of the near destitute that regularly came with small
children and belongings hurriedly stuffed into baskets or wrapped in sarongs.
To this house her father had once taken her, her mother and Por Por in one of
his frantic attempts to escape the loan sharks. She vividly remembered the
thin, sickly-looking, sad-eyed little girl who was about the same age as
herself, always wearing ragged, oversized clothes and rubber sandals, and
sleeping with her mother on a dirty mattress in a tiny corner of a room.

In the middle of the night, at least six
people woke up to the long, drawn out cry of the owl, and in the morning they
looked upon the cold stiff body of the little girl on the mattress, and the
mother squatting beside her, crying softly. She remembered her parents quickly
packing up to leave, her mother pressing some money into the hands of the
weeping woman; within a day, the house of death had been emptied of all its
tenants.

No, it was nonsense. No bird’s cry would
take her Por Por from her, and no change of behaviour in an old woman who
habitually swung from one mood to another, like a temperamental child, should
be cause for alarm.

Then Por Por suddenly emerged from her
solitude to launch upon a series of activities that were alarming, not for any
portentousness but for sheer danger to her life. She managed to slip out of the
house several times, displaying the cunning of a sly caged prisoner intently
watching for the smallest slip in vigilance of the prison keeper. She was on
one occasion found near a Hindu shrine and on another, near her favourite
haunt, the White Heaven Temple. ‘Por Por, you could have been killed by all
those cars and buses, don’t you understand?’ said Maria in tears, examining her
for injuries. Bernard had once suggested putting her in a home, the best and
most comfortable in Singapore, but spoke no more on the matter when he saw his
wife’s distress.

Then Por Por’s escapades took on a strange
focus and urgency that only later Maria understood, in a return of all the old
fears of tradition she thought she had left behind. Heng had managed to track
the old woman down at the White HeavenTemple where she seemed to have gone with
a special purpose. ‘What’s that? Show me,’ he ordered, but she insisted on
hiding something behind her back. It turned out to be nothing alarming, only a
joss stick that she must have taken from one of the many urns in the temple.

‘Por Por, what are you doing?’ Anna Seetoh
asked as she saw the old woman stirring some ash in a cup of water with a
spoon. The maid said it was ash from the joss stick; she had been trying to
make a mixture for some time, like a small child engrossed in make-believe
cooking.

‘Por Por, what on earth –’ Maria had opened
the bedroom door in response to the frantic knocking.

The old woman was holding the cup of joss
stick water and walking towards Bernard who had sat up, fully awake.

She put the cup to his lips, saying clearly
in her dialect, ‘Drink this, it will cure you.’

The strange incident could have been
dismissed as yet one more harmless eccentricity of demented old age if it had
not been followed by a similar one, this time while they were having breakfast.
Por Por walked straight up to Bernard, removed a packet of something from her
blouse pocket, and said, ‘The gods have blessed this. Wear it close to your
heart. It will save you.’