For Sarah

 

How happy I was if I could forget

To remember how sad I am

Would be an easy adversity

But the recollecting of Bloom

 

Keeps making November difficult

Till I who was almost bold

Lose my way like a little Child

And perish of the cold.

 

—Emily Dickinson

I

Mrs Dada said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lulu had her work cut out for her. The tables had to be set; the men from Neo Garden were coming. And then, thought Cheryl Dada, what a morning—

What a fucking hot morning. For so it had always seemed to her that clouds would gather when it was the hottest, that some draught would hover over the home, that the heavens would open. But now, sniffing the warm, sultry surroundings, she was sure there was no cool air to plunge into. “Doesn’t smell of rain,” Cheryl Dada said to herself, staring up at the sky. “No chance of rain today,” she said again. Sweat was dripping down her back. Cotton—or not? Cheryl Dada thought, rubbing her right palm against the baby blue pants that were sticking to her thighs. Probably not, though it certainly wasn’t chiffon either. Chiffon was the cream panel top she put on for today. Sleeveless and light, it was supposed to keep her cool. But it was not airy as advertised. “Fuck AIRYSTOCRACY!” Mrs Dada said, biting the words, as she remembered the slogan plastered on the window display—FEEL HIGH AND LIGHT! She should have guessed as much that airy meant nothing in this equatorial climate. With crossed arms and a strong neck, she stood on the porch, waiting for a breeze.

Mrs Dada did not see this coming: the heat; the cloudless sky; the air that was thick with haze. Her plan was to go to Ang Mo Kio Hub to buy an assortment of flowers but that would be too arduous now, especially in this heat, alone, without Lulu, who was busy laying the tablecloths. No, Mrs Dada had decided, she would not leave the sheltered porch—not under this searing sun, not over her dead body. The weather forecast had said it would be cool. Cool, she thought, meant a walkable weather. But where was the breeze? Where was the cool? Today was anything but cool.

The weather report could have been “Thunderstorms expected tomorrow” or “Heavy showers in the morning”. The man on the television could have said it would snow; he could have said hail or typhoon or cyclone. He could have thrown out some weather jargon that nobody would understand. He could have said something curious, something extraordinary. But to say cool temperatures tomorrow… Cool temperatures! What the hell was that—in Singapore anyway? That was a weak lie, utterly thoughtless. It was the kind of lie not worth telling, not even worth exposing. If it were big enough, Cheryl Dada thought, if it were far-fetched enough, it would cease to be mere lie and become a front page story: Thunder Strikes Boy Swimming in Bedok Reservoir. Snowfall in Singapore for the First Time. Avalanche on Bukit Timah Hill. But no—Cheryl Dada was certain of this—no story was ever spun from cool temperatures. Well, not in Singapore.

Come to think of it, most stories begin with lies. Most lives could be lies, Mrs Dada thought, looking into the distant blue. Lies with truths far away, far far away, then one day they become the real thing. A lie told long enough has its own life. Kudos to those who buy the truth; but she would rather a big fat lie. A good lie, she meant to add. A big, fat and good lie (note: not the same as a white lie) is a story of its own—original and unfettered by moral rectitude, relieved of the obligation to truth.

The weatherman’s greatest fault was telling a half-hearted lie that bored its way to nowhere. That’s the worst kind of lie, Cheryl Dada thought. No wonder he’s reporting the weather.

Anything would have been better than this underwhelming fib about today being cool when they had announced during morning assembly that it was 34 degrees. “Damn it!” Cheryl Dada let out as she wiped the sweat off her forehead. She should have known better than to trust a man in spectacles and a suit. That’s the typical conman’s dress code, she thought to herself. Remember when that curly-haired man locked her in the guest room? He was in a handsome checked shirt too, looking decent until he held her wrists and insisted she and he were lovers!

Mrs Dada had trusted the weatherman and she was feeling the effects of the blunder; her skin was reddened by indignation and injustice. The rising anger was saved by a split second of confusion: was she mad at him? Or at herself for believing—again? Why was she so gullible? History is wont to repeat itself, though never in exactly the same way. If all heroes must have a tragic flaw, Mrs Dada’s was that she was too trusting.

While people are generally suspicious about strangers, particularly the ones lurking gingerly outside the MRT stations with red files tucked under their arms, Mrs Dada would entertain the unfamiliar men who came up to her, young punks in suits with stiff, glossy hair who eventually left her as eager as they found her; the woman was insufferable, they thought, asking too many questions and wanting elaborate answers to every one of her questions: “What’s the difference between accident and hospitalisation plans?” “What’s the global fund all about?” “Why do insurance companies like the colour red?” Each answer, which they thought was enough to satiate the auntie, was merely an appetiser; it was a prelude to desultory conversations of corporate conspiracies, government policies—and if they were lucky, she’d digress to more conversational topics like the CPF Act and the Retirement Sum Scheme.

Mrs Dada had a listening ear that was enthusiastic even when nothing substantial was being said. Too often she devoured facts—be they half-facts, hearsay, headlines—and spun them into solid stories, carrying all of them in her heart as though they were her own. And once she was persuaded into one belief, she bit hard and found it impossible to let go. To this day she still could not believe that Lee Kuan Yew had died. The man was immortal to her—that was the first truth and nothing else could supersede it.

It was a dark, extremely dark day when the news broke. Cheryl Dada was mostly kept in the isolation room that evening. She was so lost and listless that she picked up the paper that John Pitts had slipped under the door and wrote just below the words “Automatic Thought”: Death. “Alterative Thought”: The dark age is here. Nobody is coming to save. Not the British or Japanese. Not the Singaporean. In the column titled “Emotion or Feeling”, she scribbled offhandedly: DÉJÀ VU. She remembered struggling to write properly because her wrist was sore and there was no light.

Thinking back, the events of the day still seemed surreal to her. It was a lie—April Fool’s had come early. She was certain that whatever coffin they had prepared, the cavalcade of black cars, the lachrymose crowd on the TV were part of an elaborate hoax; the body lying in the Istana was not his. “NO!” Cheryl Dada screamed in the TV room, hurling curses at the CNA news reporter. “NO, IT CANNOT BE!” she exclaimed, and flung the remote control across the room when he first announced LKY’s death on primetime morning. She broke into a fit, her body shaking, madly convulsing as Daniel and the nurses rushed into the room and tried to hold her down. (Lulu still had the scars from the tears in her skin. Three curved marks on her left arm.) Cornered and pinned to the floor, she thought she was losing it; but anger turned her into a deaf beast, and since she could not hear them, she saw only the fluttering hands and mouths opening and closing as if they were fish gulping for air. All this pushed her over the edge. Cheryl laughed and laughed at them. She could not stop until she had been brought to the room and there was nothing to see and laugh at because the room was dark.

It was a traumatic day for Cheryl Dada and those who were around her. She who first believed that Harry—yes she called him Harry—was like Dracula and those pearlescent-skinned vampires who fed on blood for immortality could not believe otherwise. Harry had been there from Day One—what was the nation going to do without him?

The death of the Senior Minister, who had also been the first Prime Minister, the only Minister Mentor and once the Secretary-General of the PAP, haunted Cheryl Dada. The following nights she started to have nightmares about exoduses and invasions. She dreamt that a tsunami hit Marine Parade and swallowed all of their reclaimed land; that Malaysia had cut their water supply and they had to collect rain water with jerrycans and drink water that was yellow like urine; that the angry swordfish were back with a vengeance and had mutated into a bionic species whose laser bills could destroy guns and rifles, much less tree trunks. For weeks she worried over the nation’s predicament and her own future, about what would happen to them. For without Harry, Singapore was a nation of lost sheep, bleating for this and that, horrified and hungry. The only leader they knew, he was and still is the father of the nation; the godhead.

They were a young nation—half a century old! Just children! Then again, her father had passed away when she was barely two and she survived. So it’ll be okay, Cheryl consoled herself, people will get over it; people always do. Forgetfulness is resilience in some sense. We will survive, and we have survived. Still, taking the first step into the second half of the century without Harry felt wrong to her. It was unthinkable, almost sacrilegious.

Poor Cheryl Dada was hounded by the guilt of the living. PM Lee II had declared a seven-day period of mourning for the nation to remember their founding father; Cheryl tried her best to not forget too. Every day she stared at the pictures in the newspapers, detailing his heavy eye bags, the slight creases of his forehead, the waxen skin, the tuft of hair—wispy and white like the feathers in her pillow—as if that would bring him back. Yet the more she stared, the more she cauterised his face from her memory. For a long time after, try as she might, she could only conjure the face of Bela Lugosi.

Cheryl Dada’s version of the nation continued to crumble in the aftermath of his death. So great was her horror, when she found out that lions were not native to Singapore, that she did not bawl but sat unnervingly quiet at the corner of the dinner table. “Maybe elephants,” someone yelled out; “Definitely not lions,” said another. But wasn’t the Merlion a caricature of the first lions that had roamed the land? More important, if there were no lions, then what was the Merlion? What was that thing spitting water into the Singapore River?

The talk about lions transpired over dinner some weeks after LKY’s passing when Ling Na distributed a tin of Merlion cookies for dessert. It looked funny: the shape was rectangular and it was a frontal view of the Merlion’s head. Strange to not see the Merlion from its side. Strange to see only its feline head. Cheryl complained that it did not look like the Merlion; the others insisted that the Merlion could be that—it could look like anything.

The chattering went on; each woman fighting to have her voice heard. “The real Merlion nobody see before, okay—” began Loudspeaker Leow, but could not finish; her mouth was full of cookies. Felicia Phua, the youngest at the table, pasty-faced, murmured something about Asian lions. Someone—her face was blocked by Mrs Rohan—was throwing out questions: “How you know?” “Who say?” “You see before meh?” But it was Siew Eng who was winning because she had a geographical mind: “Singapore is an island surrounded by water leh, a fishing village; we are super coastal. How did the lions come here—swim ah?” Cheryl Dada would have gladly conceded to that point, but Judy Chua had to add, “Wah lau mai siao lah. Merlion where got real? Yeong tao nao sio lah. Don’t be stupid, can?”; a fucking mean thing to say. Facts were facts, and Cheryl Dada accepted that. But calling her stupid was a personal attack. God, she hated that woman; she hated her whooping voice.

Finally, Ling Na had to intervene. It was her fault, no doubt; she was the one who had brought the Merlion cookies. Like a judge with her gavel, she banged the tin on the table and there was order. “The Merlion is a story,” she began. “Singapore, like many other countries, whether big or small, needs a story,” she continued, blabbering on about Qin Shi Huang and the terracotta army, Hou Yi and Chang Er, Yue Lao and his red strings and how Sun Wu Kong conquered the West. Some of the stories were mythologies, some about the art of war, others were romances. The story was whatever the people needed.

The faces at the table brightened up, as if they had been enlightened. “Yah hor! No wonder!” The voices started again and boomed through the dining hall.

The women chomped on the sugar-free cookies. Cheryl Dada sat silent at the end of the table, her mind still ruminating on the point of stories. She sort of understood: the Merlion was like China’s Green Dragon. It was also the Centaur, the Minotaur, Medusa.

Still, the truth about the Merlion did not sit well with her. She could not be persuaded by Ling Na’s Chinese references. In her heart she fought the explanations. For Cheryl Dada, trusting as she was, had long chosen the first tale. For although she believed easily, she only believed once. History could not be wrong; the origin of the nation was irrefutable. Sang Nila Utama beheld the chimera; Singapura was a Malay fishing village. It was Malaya, not Malaysia.

The Merlion must have been a species of its own, she concluded. It had to exist, if not what was Singapore? If there were no Singapore, was she still Cheryl? The Merlion had to exist; it had to be real. And Cheryl Dada believed it was real. The certainty of her thought pleased her; but the smile departed as soon as she remembered that she was supposed to get the flowers.

There was no breeze; no cool temperature.

“Not a cloud in the sky got the fucking sun in my eye,” Cheryl Dada hummed to herself, squinting against the light that filled the creases on her face. “Argh! This fucking sun! Why is it so fucking hot?” she groaned, raising her hand to shield her eyes from the cruel glare of the sun.

The hard consonant struck her ear. So what? Mrs Dada reflected silently, tugging at her chiffon top, fanning herself. So what if she used a couple of bad words here and there? As if people in the neighbourhood were saints. No one was squeaky clean here—for example, Siew Eng on the third floor of block A threw her cigarette butts, sometimes still lighted, out of the window. Evidence of her misdemeanour was found in the flowerbeds, the lettuce patch, the herb garden, everywhere except the bin.

Like in most homes, there were a lot of pent-up frustrations and wandering emotions that surfaced every now and then. They found their way into an elbow shove, a sudden push, an uncaused fight, a false accusation, a fire alarm going off. (That did actually happen when one resident attempted to suffocate herself to death by locking herself in a room while burning a basket of letters.) It was one reason why the doctors and social workers insisted on incorporating art therapy into the residents’ schedules, citing to Management studies that showed it would help to channel negativity into canvases and slow down the onset of mental diseases. Their selling point was that the big private homes like St Luke’s and Red River Valley used such therapy and therefore they should too; Management agreed. The residents were mostly happy about having an extra option of activity to choose from. However, Cheryl was sceptical about art classes, unconvinced that emotional expression could be taught and curated into square blocks of scribblings and ugly splashes of colours. For a moment or two she thought about Choon Eng’s purple sea that was hanging, on a nail, on the main wall of the lobby.

What was Choon Eng thinking about when she painted that? Cheryl wondered meditatively, remembering the droopy eyelids that veiled the woman’s pretty black eyes. They were eyes that reflected the weariness of one whose brightness had been robbed by youthful afflictions, eyes that saw the world as regal and peace-loving despite what they’ve had to see.

Choon Eng’s sea was iridescent purple. Perhaps it was the cataracts that had turned the reds muddy. Perhaps she had imagined a version of the red sea—she used to be religious and wore an ostentatious gold crucifix around her neck. Or perhaps it was the sea that had asked to be painted. The waves were accentuated with spikes to show that the waters were ever moving; the outline was made bold in a red shade of purple, almost maroon, as if the sea were impenetrable. Over and over the paintbrush swept across the surface of the canvas producing a thick and uneven patch of sky with melding hues of purple and pink. Because Cheryl had inspected the painting countless times, she could roughly separate the purple sky from the purple sea. But it seemed to her that ambivalence was good and the division was unnecessary. Purple is as red as pink to the dead anyway.

Whether art therapy was advantageous to the old folks was disputable. What was supposedly really helpful were the geropsychologists: John Pitts and Barbara Smart. They were the expats with professional expertise hired to increase the quality of residential life. But they only came in thrice a week and knocked off exactly at five when they did. They were not available in the middle of the night, when help was most needed. Sometimes there would be wails in the wee hours of the night and then they would stop before one could identify the source; sometimes the sound of glass shattering woke the home and then it would cease as abruptly as it began. Those who were nosy and agile would hurry out of their rooms and find no commotion. The whole place was suddenly and serenely empty of noise. Not even the sound of people snoring. Rage was real but hushed. The home was hushed.

For better or worse, it was Judy Chua who would break the eerie silence of the night and the peace of the day. Hers was a high-pitched and grating voice that could cut through the wooden doors and pierce you in the temples, causing many to roll their eyes when she spoke. Judy Chua—they called her Chor Lor—lived on the ground floor of block A. It’s A for Apricot, though some say it’s A for Atas; yet Judy Chua was neither sweet nor uptown. She was, however, powerful—powerful enough to secure a prime room with a small private garden in the most expensive block. At 81 she had rank and years on her side. She could do no wrong, and she did no right. Her mouth was a terror—and it was not just the blatant spitting of phlegm on other people’s shoes. Cursing was her way of talking: her punctuations, accents, exclamations. What angered Judy Chua the most was if someone looked her way and the eyes lingered. Even to a look of adoration, she would throw back a death stare and start cursing. “Kan ni na kua si mi?” Her mouth would widen as she spat the words: “Kua si mi lan chiao?” as if to devour completely the transgressor.

“That woman swears like a trooper,” said Cheryl Dada to herself, shaking her head at the thought that they lived in the same block. Even Judy Chua’s gestures were vulgar. Once she had grabbed a broom to hit at Juwel, who was trimming the grass patch outside her door, and did not stop until the nurses strapped her down. Chor Lor… Was that Teochew? Boy, did she earn her name.

The spiralling thoughts brought Cheryl Dada to the firm conclusion that she was not the worst of the lot. She might not be a saint but she was nowhere as uncouth and disrespectful as Judy Chua, and not nearly as inconsiderate as Chin Siew Eng. And even if she were as bad as people thought, at least she wasn’t the only one. People ought to remember that. Not all old people are the same, Cheryl thought to herself. The word left a nauseating residue in her mouth.

“Ou…ouh…” she shaped her lips as if to whistle a tune. Although the topic of age was not taboo in the home, it was seldom discussed because it was dull. Age, to many adult women, after all, is a relative and pointless calculation.

In the home, there were women in their fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, a handful in their nineties, and three centenarians. Quite unlike in the garden-variety old folks’ homes, there were a good number of residents in their forties, a couple in their late thirties even. Felicia Phua, for instance, was 40 and Siew Eng had turned 43 last week. They weren’t old old, certainly not as old as Auntie Ah Luan or Mrs Rohan; they were just damned enough to be here.

Felicia, plagued with severe kyphosis, who had been in a wheelchair since she was 33, was known around the neighbourhood as the Hunchback of Ang Mo Kio. As for Siew Eng, the woman was a one-legger: her right leg had been amputated after a freak car accident on the winding slope of the Cameron Highlands. Still more damned: Felicia used to be a competitive runner in school and Siew Eng, a tour guide. Both had relied a great deal on their legs. Thank God, they had met in the home and bonded through prayers to Saint Servatius—the patron for those with foot troubles.

Much like Cheryl Dada, they were women whose lives became associated with those of the invalid, damned, handicapped, infirm and spouseless. Regardless of age, they all gathered in the home. The three of them were part of the small minority, barring the Malay and Indian ladies. They were the English type who preferred to say “fuck” and “shit” and “damn it”, and watched Wheel of Fortune instead of Channel 8 soaps. Nothing like the other Chinese women who spoke Hokkien and Cantonese, and who swore just as much, if not more.

Steadfast in Duty

A few years ago a co-ed school was built on the same plot of land. The paint was brighter, the building taller, the field trimmed. The canteen remained where it was; near the back gate. Cheryl passed by once when she was on home leave. There were boys and girls in green and yellow uniforms carrying their oversized bags, some holding hands, some buying ice cream from the Wall’s cart by the traffic light. The older kids were hanging around the bus stop, waiting for the feeder bus; the younger ones stood by the side gate and looked out for their maids. Cheryl was standing there by the green fence where she had stood decades ago, looking into the football field; but everything was unfamiliar. She could no longer put the place to her memory. St Joan’s was a disembodied fragment of the past. Cheryl wondered if she had imagined that year in school.

The one thing that assured her—what she remembered most vividly of St Joan’s—was the perfume of the good damp earth with a hint of citrus. It flushed her with the hope of youth and brought her to the top of the world and to the end of herself. When the soil was roiled and the grass freshly cut, and her body suffused with warmth and midday languor, Cheryl Dada was reminded that the world was larger than the home.

But why was she thinking of St Joan’s now? Where did the thoughts about it come from, all of a sudden? Her mind had no room for St Joan’s, for the party was her priority. Today, the party was her world.