State of Emergency Read online

  State of Emergency

  A Novel

  Jeremy Tiang

  ISBN: 978-981-1700-98-9

  First Edition: October 2018

  © 2017 by Jeremy Tiang

  Author photo by Oliver Rockwell. Used with permission.

  Published in Singapore by Epigram Books

  www.epigrambooks.sg

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO FROM THE EPIGRAM BOOKS FICTION PRIZE

  2017

  The Riot Act by Sebastian Sim (Winner)

  Sofia and the Utopia Machine by Judith Huang

  9th of August by Andre Yeo

  Nimita’s Place by Akshita Nanda

  If It Were Up to Mrs Dada by Carissa Foo

  18 Walls by Teo Xue Shen

  Band Eight by Tham Cheng-E

  2016

  The Gatekeeper by Nuraliah Norasid (Winner)

  Fox Fire Girl by O Thiam Chin

  Surrogate Protocol by Tham Cheng-E

  Lieutenant Kurosawa’s Errand Boy by Warran Kalasegaran

  The Last Immigrant by Lau Siew Mei

  Misdirection by Ning Cai

  Lion Boy and Drummer Girl by Pauline Loh

  2015

  Now That It’s Over by O Thiam Chin (Winner)

  Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao! by Sebastian Sim

  Death of a Perm Sec by Wong Souk Yee

  Sugarbread by Balli Kaur Jaswal

  Annabelle Thong by Imran Hashim

  Kappa Quartet by Daryl Qilin Yam

  Altered Straits by Kevin Martens Wong

  for my parents, Helen and Victor Samuel

  “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”

  ­­—Walter Benjamin,

  Theses on the Philosophy of History

  (trans. Harry Zohn)

  1

  Jason

  Mollie Remedios died in the explosion that tore apart MacDonald House on 10 March 1965. She was at her desk in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank adding columns of figures when the wall behind her shattered, followed by the ceiling. She suffered several broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a basal skull fracture that killed her instantly. She was 24 years old.

  There were three fatalities apart from Mollie—two girls who worked in the same office (the newspapers called them all girls, even though one of them was nearly 40 and divorced), and a driver for the neighbouring Borneo Malaya Building Society, killed by a drainpipe detaching and crashing decisively through the roof of his car. Thirty-three other people were taken to the General Hospital, where seven were warded with serious injuries.

  The three dead women, wholesomely pretty, would be on the covers of all the newspapers the next day. Mollie in particular was featured for her youth and promise; the tragedy of her being so recently married, leaving a baby behind. The driver lay unconscious in hospital for five days before dying, and so missed out on most of the publicity.

  Mollie’s brother Jason was in his office on Connaught Drive when the first reports came on the radio, a few minutes after the explosion itself. There was a moment of absolute stillness in the room before Jason was down the stairs and on his bicycle, pedalling past the Padang and then down Penang Road. Traffic thickened on his approach to the red brick building, as drivers stopped to stare and abandoned cars littered the street.

  Rain made the scene dreamlike. Bank workers stood calmly on the pavement, many of them bleeding from small cuts. The tall white men from the Australian High Commission, which occupied rooms above the bank, looked unhurt but far angrier. A thin old woman lay on a stretcher as ambulance workers tried to staunch the blood seeping from her forehead. The building looked undamaged from the outside, apart from the windows, which had sprayed their glass outward for a hundred feet around and now gaped black and empty.

  A policeman in khaki shorts stood in front of Jason as he tried to approach the building. Stop, he said, grabbing Jason’s shoulder so he almost fell off his bike—no entry permitted. He stumbled over the English words. My sister, said Jason, trying to keep his voice calm. My sister inside. But the policeman merely repeated, as if from a script, Awas, danger, the building is unsafe.

  Men with notebooks and cameras circled the wreckage warily. Rumours rippled through the crowd: a burst gas main, structural defects, and then, with more and more resonance, the word bomb.

  When the police grudgingly confirmed this, reporters formed a queue behind the two working telephone booths, and photographers sped off in taxis to get their pictures developed before the print deadline. Everyone seemed aware the story now being created would eventually work its way into the new national mythology. This was the worst incident yet of Konfrontasi, the confrontation with Indonesia. This was Sukarno tightening the screws, and there would have to be some kind of response.

  Police fanned out on both sides of the road to prevent looting. Jason clung to his bicycle, saying over and over, my sister, my sister, until they left him alone. He found himself marooned on the black sea of rain-slick road, shards of glass glistening at his feet like stars. The British bomb disposal squad arrived, men with brave voices. They looked more confident than the local police, but there was little for them to do except mark off the perimeter with little flags and speak urgently into their walkie-talkies. They sounded like people in films.

  “Where is everyone? Where are the survivors?” Jason clutched at uniformed arms as they passed, asking first in English and then Malay. The police shrugged, pointed at the crowds on the pavement. There was no order to this, no one was tallying lists of the living. There were too many to take in—human mountains, human oceans, they say in Chinese. “Are there still people inside?” Nobody could answer this. Rescue workers carted rubble out in wheelbarrows, manhandling great slabs of concrete out of the way.

  When they began bringing the bodies out, he knew. He tried to get closer, to rip the concealing blankets off, but they stopped him again. Go to the hospital, they said. Not here, not in the open.

  No one offered him a lift, and he had to cycle again through the slick streets, up New Bridge Road and into Outram. The morgue was in a basement, painted sickly green. The assistant made him stop shouting before he would show him the bodies of first two strangers and then his sister.

  Mollie’s face was crusted with blood, her familiar eyes open but filmed over. Flecks of rubble were lodged under her tongue, behind her perfect teeth. The attendant stopped him from touching the evidence. Jason was only required to nod for identification. Then the corpse was taken away to be labelled.

  He declined tea and slumped in the corridor. Who would pick the children up from his parents’ flat? Mollie usually got her daughter before he came for his twins. He tried to do something, call their parents, but the air seemed to press on him, keeping him immobile. There were things he wanted to say to Mollie, but of course she was not there. He was later unable to work out how long he’d spent in that basement. When he emerged, the rain had stopped and a weak sun was shining.

  The bombers were arrested three days later, two Indonesian guerrillas caught trying to escape by sea. They had been given a Malaysian Airways bag containing between twenty and twenty-five pounds of nitroglycerine, and told to detonate it in any public building. They had landed at eleven in the morning
and, after lunch, left the explosives up a flight of stairs in the imposing bank.

  In Jason’s memory, the killers died very soon after that, even though he has looked up the dates and knows it took three years for them to exhaust their appeals. They were hanged within the high walls of Changi Prison on 17 October 1968. Like many people, Jason stood at the prison gates that day, waiting for the flag to go up to indicate the executions had taken place.

  Now, at a distance of fifty years, Jason’s instinct for revenge feels blunted. It makes no difference what these men did, why their leaders told them to, if it could have been avoided. It doesn’t matter that they were punished. Entirely irrational, he thinks if only his sister had not died, if Mollie had been in another room that day, if she had taken an early tea break, then he too might have been saved. Lying now on his iron bed, aware that he is dying, there are moments when he can think only of Mollie, can wonder only whether it was fear or peace that filled her mind as she looked up and saw the world, unimaginably, begin to fall apart.

  •

  In the minutes immediately after waking, Jason Low cannot remember where he is. There is no guarantee it will be morning, and in fact it often isn’t—he needs so little sleep these days. He lies in the indeterminate pre-dawn gloom, squinting to make out shapes in the dark. He can hear laboured breathing, smell disinfectant. Reaching for his wife, for Siew Li, his fingers hit only the metal railing around his bed, and he thinks prison for a moment, before remembering he’s in hospital.

  The bed is in a Class C ward, which means there are seven other bodies in the room. He would rather be alone, but his Medisave account is running out after several years of lavish disease. Whenever he tentatively mentions going private, like a nice room in Mount Elizabeth, his daughter Janet’s mouth snaps shut like a purse. She appears to regard her inheritance as a fait accompli, and any unnecessary spending as straightforward theft from his grandchildren. He could go against her wishes, but if he angers Janet and she stops visiting, then no one will. Light begins to seep into the room, and the grey walls take on their daytime shade of bilious green. Next to him is Madam Ngoh, the mouth breather, who cries out in her sleep to absent children. Although they have nothing in common—she barely speaks English—he has come to depend on her. They are both here for the long haul, surviving as the other beds fill and empty with transients, dilettantes who breeze in with cataracts and leave without. They don’t even have to cut you open for kidney stones these days; a laser goes right through without breaking the skin.

  None of the beds have curtains drawn around them, which is a good sign—it means no one has died during the night. In the fortnight he’s been here, he’s seen three bodies removed from the ward (discreetly, under sheets). Each time, he glanced across at Madam Ngoh, and she looked as apprehensive as he felt. Time is picking us off one by one, he thought, like characters in a horror film.

  There is something unseemly about the place itself. The nurses, talking amongst themselves, call it “gerry”—“I’m on gerry tonight,” they say, sometimes right in front of him. He doesn’t blame them, even though it’s disrespectful—he knows his face is falling in on itself, his eyes dim, his mouth slack. How are they to know that there is sentience in all this drooping flesh? He has tried telling them about the dream of Gerontius, but they don’t have time to listen to his old man’s mumble, his old-fashioned insistence on complete sentences, just briskly assume he’s mispronouncing “geriatric” and assure him, Yes, that’s where you are, Mr Low. The gerry ward.

  Before coming here, he used to enjoy this part of the day—the faint chill of the air, the light mist over the field downstairs. He would make himself a cup of tea in the dim false dawn and sit at his kitchen table, listening to the neighbours beginning to wake up. The hospital is different. There is already a tinny feeling of readiness as the night shift hands over, as tureens of Quaker oats are filled and loaded onto trolleys. He tries to sit up, but that makes his sheets rustle unnaturally loudly. Only the higher-class wards are carpeted. This room has noisy tiled floors and a ceiling fan.

  Not that he’s particularly eager for the day to start. After breakfast, the nurses come round with medication, and at some point in the morning he will have a sponge bath. Afternoons grind by, once the lunch trays have been cleared away and he has nothing to do. There’s a television in one corner of the room but he worries about looking in its direction, alarmed at the great chunks of time that slip away in chat shows and cookery programmes. He wonders if his face in repose takes on the same deadened look he sees in the others as they gape at the machine. He wishes he could read instead, but it’s too much effort to hold a book upright, to concentrate.

  His daughter invariably arrives with the first wave of visitors at five on the dot. She has to leave work early to ensure this, and is always sure to let him know if this has meant walking out of an important meeting or letting a deadline lapse. He wants to say, You didn’t have to—but what if she takes him at his word and stops coming?

  Janet is a schoolteacher—at least she was, until her talent for bureaucracy was spotted by someone high up in the Ministry. She still looks like one, with her stiff cardigans and martinet’s glasses, her hair tightly permed. Jason is faintly stunned every time he remembers his daughter is less than a decade from retirement. It seems wrong that she should be old.

  His grandsons occasionally come with her, clearly press-ganged and eager to run away as soon as they can, citing films to see, girlfriends to meet. They are in their twenties now, tall and well-nourished, speaking the uninflected dull English the young all seem to use. Janet’s husband put in a perfunctory appearance right at the start, but he’s busy with his grassroots work, and as the hospital is far from his constituency there isn’t much point being seen here. He has a lot of ground to cover.

  Visiting hours go on till eight, and every evening Janet dutifully sits by her father’s bedside until the nurses begin asking people to leave. Sometimes she tells him about her work or the boys’ accomplishments, but for the most part she is happy to sit in silence, making quick notes on a policy document, as if her presence is all that’s required. Each visit ends with her reading from The Daily Bread, a handbag-sized booklet of devotional tracts she gets free from her church. Jason has told her he’s not religious, but she brushes that aside. There’s nothing wrong in being reminded how to behave well, she tells him. Although neither of them will say this, both know she is thinking about the small amount of time he still has on earth, her tiny opportunity to save his imperilled soul.

  •

  As a civil servant, Jason ran his life along orderly tramlines—each day as like the one before as possible. His department gained a reputation for efficiency. Meetings started on time with no deviations from the agenda. Projects finished exactly when they were supposed to and never over budget. At the retirement dinner on his 65th birthday, even the Minister joked about how they’d had no need to look at their clocks with Jason around to keep them on schedule. They gave him a gold watch and engraved plaque. He’d always done everything exactly as he should. Was this his reward?

  His current incarceration feels like a hellish version of this earlier life: wide empty days punctuated with regular, worthless events. Even Janet’s visits, which should be the highlight of each day, feel cloying and airless as soon as they commence. He knows his daughter is prompted more by duty than affection. At least his sense of obligation has passed on to one of his children. He has tried asking for sleeping pills to get through the afternoon, but the nurse will only give them out at night, with a doctor’s approval.

  The main problem is in his own mind, which seems weak and spongy. He has always prided himself on his grasp of facts, but now he cannot hold anything in his head for long. More than once he has had to ask a nurse to buy him a newspaper on her lunch break as a favour, because he was too embarrassed to ask the date. It hardly matters, he has no appointments for the foreseeable future, but it feels necessary to hold on to his sense of w
ho he is. He will not become a person so irrelevant to the world he does not know which month it is.

  When desperate to make conversation with Janet, he sometimes accidentally asks her about people who are gone. How is your mother, he says. How is Auntie Mollie? The first time it happened, she glared at him as if he were a troublesome student, as if he might have been joking. Now, she simply murmurs, “Dead, Pa,” then adroitly changes the subject as if to save them both from embarrassment.

  He doesn’t know how to explain to her that he knows they are dead. Truly, he is aware of how much he has lost. And yet, they are inside him. He cannot tell her about the long conversations he has with the departed, whiling away long afternoons, as he tries over and over to understand where they went. He cannot tell her that sometimes his sister, and sometimes his wife, come to visit him in the small hours of the morning.

  “Lost in his own past,” he heard her whisper once on the phone. People are becoming less cautious around him. Perhaps they think his hearing is going, since everything else is. Unlike her brother, Janet has never had time for bygones, preferring instead to focus on what she calls her goals. “You need to know where you’re headed,” she is fond of saying. “Otherwise how will you ever get there?”

  Sometimes he thinks this is supposed to happen, his life flashing before his eyes at the end, the final moments expanding to fit everything that’s gone before. But the events are not unfolding in an orderly way, which would at least make them easy to follow. He finds his attention constantly wandering, sinking into the fog of memory, meeting old enemies, replaying arguments he should have won. Afterwards, he is angry for some time without being able to remember why.

  Jason has lost a great deal—more, he considers, than the usual attrition of a long life. He spends the hot sleepless nights making lists. His parents, of course, long ago. His sister and his wife, taken from him in different ways. His son in London, a city on the other side of the world. Janet, who belongs to no one but herself. And Barnaby, his brother-in-law—he decides to add Barnaby to the list of the missing, even though they were never particularly close. Gone is gone.