Miss Seetoh in the World (50 page)

It was Sunday, her day to luxuriate in bed
with the perverse intent not to rise until the hour of noon that officially
marked the end of the morning to compensate for the previous six days’ tyranny
of the alarm clock.

At about six in the morning, when it was
still dark, the phone rang shrilly. It was Maggie. She said, ‘Miss Seetoh, did
you read your newspaper yet? Look at page six of The Singapore Tribune. Also
the Chinese newspaper. They even show picture.’

It took Maria a few seconds to shake off the
languor of sleep and ask, ‘Maggie, what on earth are you talking about?’

The girl, wherever she was, whatever she was
doing in her new life, had not left off her old love of positioning herself
with new knowledge that others would have to come begging for, exerting new
power that would require others to come pleading for forgiveness. Maria would
never forget that day in the café when Maggie had gone all out to humiliate
her.

But the girl’s voice had none of the
remembered defiance or malice. She repeated matter-of-factly, ‘Miss Seetoh, I
just told you. Look in newspaper. Better the Chinese newspaper. More news.’

‘But, but – Maggie, wait!’ The girl had
already hung up. Maria was sure, as she got up quickly, that it would not be
the last of Maggie’s calls.

She wished that her former student, hard,
bitter, relentless, were completely out of her life. Somebody had told her that
Maggie had been seen in lounges and bars with hard-drinking men, almost
unrecognisable in the full unabashed trappings of the playgirl companion: heavy
make-up, tight-fitting clothes with plunging necklines, black stockings,
high-heeled shoes, the defiant cigarette in the pouty red mouth. She wondered
what was happening to her sister Angel.

The Singapore Tribune ignored suicides
unless committed in unusual circumstances that made for newsworthiness over at
least a successive week’s reporting. It carried a brief report only of the
suicides of Mark Wong and Loo Yen Ping but the details in the report were
tantalising enough to promise follow-up reports: both were wearing the
blue-and-white uniforms of St Peter’s Secondary School, a mixed Catholic
school, when they plunged from the twelfth storey of a block of flats in the
vicinity of the school, probably in the early hours of Saturday morning; both
carried farewell letters to various people in their pockets; both had died on
the spot. Probably the most tantalising detail was the fact that they had
jumped side by side, their wrists bound together by a red silk scarf.

The Chinese newspaper carried a picture of
the dead couple, under a large white plastic sheet, with the right foot of the
boy peeping out, as well as of a hysterical Mrs Gloria Wong kneeling beside the
bodies, supported by two relatives or friends. The report was very detailed.
Mrs Wong was screaming again and again, ‘I curse the day that you were born!’;
she could have been directing the curse at the girl who had caused her son’s
death, or even at her son who had brought her so much suffering despite all her
efforts to give him a good future. The newspaper reporter, looking to flesh out
his report, quickly concluded that parental objection had been the cause of the
suicide pact. He did some quick, skilful investigation and interviewing of
those relatives who were prepared to talk. He made much of the fact that the
pair had been classmates in St Peter’s Secondary School, and that the boy had
chosen, in death, to wear his old school uniform. How had he got the
information that the silk handkerchief of intimate union in death bore the
couple’s initials? There was reference to a small teddy found on the scene.
Maria remembered that Yen Ping had told her of her having embroidered their
initials on its collar.

Mrs Wong had been too distraught to say
anything after the cursing; she had fainted several times, and had to be
carried into a car and taken home. There was no mention of the parents or
relatives of Yen Ping arriving at the scene of the tragedy. The Chinese
newspaper reported, accurately, that the boy was preparing to go to the United
Kingdom for further studies, and, inaccurately, that the girl was preparing to
join him there. In the following days, journalistic enthusiasm overreached
itself, and managed to secure some pictures of the couple in happier times,
which were splashed in the newspaper. One showed Mark and Yen Ping at some
school outing, dressed in their blue-and-white school uniforms, another in an
unidentified place with trees in the background, standing very close to each
other, but not touching. The Straits Tribune did not have any follow-up report
on the request of the Deputy Minister of Trade and Business who was related to
Mrs Gloria Wong.

‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ gasped Maria, and
rushed to the bathroom to be sick. The school would be full of the terrible news
the next morning, but meanwhile, she found herself being propelled along, pale
and hollow-eyed, in a thick, dark fog that seeped into her mind and clogged it,
preventing her from thinking clearly, and into her heart, suspending all
feelings except shock. In the numbed state two thoughts occurred but were soon
absorbed back into the dark, chill numbness: should she put a call to Brother
Philip in Ireland to let him know, since she had been confiding the story of
poor Mark and Yen Ping to him? And should she go to the mortuary to take a look
at the two broken bodies, as they really looked in the tragic culmination of
their love, bearing the marks of their violent death, before the embalmer came
to do his work of erasing the brutal truth with his powder and paint? Maria had
seen few corpses in her life, and they all looked peaceful and serene as they
lay in their coffins, the lines of anxiety or pain on their faces smoothed out,
their hands placed gently by their sides or folded upon their chests. Sister Elizabeth,
despite the ravages of her cancer, actually looked beautiful, as if she were in
calm, undisturbed sleep.

No, there was no point calling Brother
Philip; she would only sound incoherent in her distress, and be unable to
answer the questions that he was sure to ask. No point distressing him when he
was so far away, unable to do anything. And no, she shouldn’t go to the
mortuary not only because there might be regulations about admission for only
family members, but also because she feared that each time she wanted to
remember the much loved students, memory would conjure up only an image of two
blood-encrusted bodies lying on cold stone slabs in the mortuary. She thought
of the time she saw them sitting on the stairs of a school staircase, Mark
helping Yen Ping neaten her plaits, combing out her long hair and watching with
a waiting clip in his hands as her fingers expertly did the plaiting.

In her album of memories of the dead, the
images would be carefully selected for their special pleasant associations. But
it had a dark ugly twin that forced itself into memory and night dreams. It
bore only fearsome images – of impenetrable forests and murky ponds, bodies and
rings lying at the bottom of the ponds, owls hooting, children in flight – and
she knew that it now included that newspaper picture of the crumpled bodies of
Mark and Yen Ping lying under a large white sheet, with Mark’s right foot,
bereft of its shoe, protruding.

 The shock of an event could actually elicit
hope; something so shocking could not have happened, so it could only be a
nightmare. She had heard of a bereaved mother who covered her ears against the
news of her son’s fatal fall from a cliff during a school camping expedition,
screaming: ‘No, no, no, go away! This is a bad dream, and I’ll wake up tomorrow
and find Barry coming downstairs for breakfast!’

At no time did Maria surrender to the sense
of surreality that gripped her and say, ‘It’s not true, there must be a mistake
somewhere,’ so that her faculties, instead of being mobilised for denial, were
readying themselves to accept and cope with the brute truth of an unspeakable
tragedy – Mark Wong and Yen Ping were truly dead and gone, in a suicide pact,
oblivious to the messy aftermath of police investigations, parental grief, a
whole school in shock.

 Maria paced the floor by the phone table,
wishing Maggie would call again; Maggie, the inveterate seeker of information
bent on ferreting out every tantalising detail, might by now have more to
share. What was in the letters addressed to the parents? The Chinese newspaper
had reported several letters now in police hands; could one of them have been
addressed to her, the teacher they had trusted with their innermost secrets?
She would keep the letter in tender, anguished memory for the rest of her life.
She suddenly remembered their pledge of eternal love written in blood, which
Yen Ping had shown her, worn in a little silver locket round her neck. Mark’s
token must have been hidden in some secret place; had he taken it out and worn
it too, just before their plunge from the high-rise block of flats? The
meticulousness of the young couple, seen in the care they had taken over their
various class assignments could be extrapolated to the planning of the pact –
the choice of day, time and place, the choice of clothes, the selection of the
binding scarf.

In her mind, Maria had a vivid picture of
the couple, huddled together in the dawn darkness on the twelfth floor of the
building, speaking in low voices, checking, for the last time, that everything
was in order and as planned, going through the various items they wanted to
take with them in their final, loving journey together.

 Why had they chosen that spot? Did it have
some sentimental value for them, having been one of their trysting places?
Maria suddenly remembered that in one of her stories for the creative writing
class, Yen Ping had described a suicide pact between two young lovers; they had
not plunged from a tall building, but waded into the ocean together, and there
was mention of a silk scarf tying their wrists together. Had the young lovers,
even as they were telling her of their plans to study hard and prove themselves
worthy of their respective families’ trust, already decided to die together?
Maria cried out in her anguish, ‘Oh Mark, oh Yen Ping.’

All morning, she waited by the phone,
longing for a call from Maggie, from a colleague who might have happened to get
the news early, from a student in the creative writing class who might have
hurried to the scene, from Mr Ignatius Lim, from anyone at all. On impulse, in
the late afternoon, she went to the scene of the tragedy; it had been cordoned
off by the police. She stood looking at the spot where they had fallen
together, now cleaned of the blood that must have gushed out simultaneously
from their bodies as they hit the ground together. What were their last words
to each other? These could have come from any of the poems written on the
favourite pale blue paper, which, if they had not been so profoundly felt,
would have been dismissed as worthless cliché in the creative writing class:
‘Our bodies may breathe their last, but our love breathes on in the silent wind
and stars,’ ‘We will meet on love’s eternal shore where no more tears will
flow, where love can only grow.’

On the other hand, the last words could be
the unuttered ones of sheer panic, as they looked at the hard ground rushing up
to meet them, and suddenly saw, in a flash, that perhaps after all, they had
made a mistake too late to undo. Did they see the years of arduous study in
college, and patient waiting, culminating in a marriage and a happy family
life, all wiped out by a mistake which carried its own fearful momentum, ending
only when their bodies and the hard ground were brought together in one
blinding, pitiless second? Perhaps they saw themselves falling through the air
together in slow motion, like a giant soft toy thrown out of the window by an
angry child, sailing slowly downwards, its limbs flopping about gently, ending
in a black void of nothingness, while friends, family and schoolmates went
about their usual business in the world.

Mr Ignatius Lim held an urgent meeting with
his staff. His face taut with anxiety, he told them there would be police
investigations including interviews with Yen Ping’s teachers; this was the
special demand made by Mrs Gloria Wong who had already informed him that nobody
from St Peter’s Secondary School would be allowed to attend Mark’s wake or
funeral. She had placed an obituary notice the day after his death, with a
recent photograph of him in coat and tie; it had said simply that Mark Wong Lam
Yoong, aged seventeen, had passed away peacefully, leaving behind his beloved
mother Mrs Gloria Anne Wong and ended with the terse request: ‘No wreaths
please.’ Mr Ignatius Lim said, his brow knit with worry, ‘It is most
unfortunate that St Peter’s has been implicated, most unfortunate indeed. Our
good name will be gone. The Ministry will want to conduct its own
investigation.’ He shifted about in his chair and continued, ‘And all because
of some poems that the deceased had written to each other in the Creative
Writing Class, which, as you all know, has been converted into the Remedial
Language Lab.’ He avoided looking at Maria, as did everyone else at the sombre
meeting.

She thought, the bastard, he only cares
about the reputation to his school, and rose to say, in an even voice, ‘I’m
sorry about this unfortunate incident, and take responsibility for the poems
which Mr Lim just now mentioned, because I had encouraged my students to
express their thoughts and feelings freely. I would like now to give notice of
my resignation.’

Then she walked out of the staffroom. She
would have liked an immediate resignation, but the twenty-four-hour notice
entailed financial costs she could not afford. Besides, she needed time to be
with her students, to explain things as best as she could, to give closure to
her life at St Peter’s Secondary School. It was the practice of the school to
give a farewell dinner to a departing teacher; she would remember to write a
brief note of polite refusal to Mr Lim.