State of Emergency Read online

  He cannot get used to this changing roster of staff. There are too many nurses, some of them foreign and difficult to understand. The doctors are all young, and often look tired. None of them have time to listen to him, not when it takes him such a while to get the words out. It isn’t his fault, he used to be very good with language—all his teachers at school were British, Oxbridge-educated, and when he drafted letters for his English superiors, they never failed to tell him how superb his phrasing was. You might be one of us, they said.

  When Janet arrives, he tries to explain why he is upset. She gives the appearance of listening to him while staring into her compact mirror, retouching her make-up in short, angry strokes. Her cheeks are beginning to look gaunt, he notices.

  “She wasn’t really your friend,” says Janet, before he has finished. “It’s Stockholm syndrome.”

  “She was company.”

  “I’m company. I come every day. Why don’t you just make some new friends?”

  “They never stay long enough.”

  “How long do you want to stay here?”

  And then they are silent, trying to pretend she has not asked how much longer he intends to live. She puts away her lipstick and roots around in her handbag. Unexpectedly, her hand emerges with a tangle of wool, which shakes out into the beginnings of a scarf.

  “Knitting,” she explains unnecessarily, slightly embarrassed. “Like an old woman, I know.”

  “It’s good to have a hobby. Your mother used to sew.” Although not in an arts and crafts way, he wants to add. Just to survive, just to have clothes for the baby. For you. There is a cloud of words he cannot fight through—he just wants to say her name, Siew Li.

  Janet seems to feel something of this. “You never talk

  about her.”

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  It is his standard response, and shuts the conversation down. Janet is used to this, and does not push. Perhaps she is glad—both she and Henry spent their childhoods asking about their mother, who was not dead, but not there either. Their questions met with evasion, and then rage. Now that they have established a routine, an unbreakable silence, Janet seems happy to accept what cannot be known. Perhaps she has her own secrets.

  “She sent letters, didn’t she? Those ones with the Malaysian stamps. We worked out later they must be from her.”

  So they knew. He thought he’d been so clever. “What does it matter now?”

  “I wanted to ask you, but Henry wouldn’t let me. We were so scared of you.”

  “I suppose I’m less scary now.” What has he done to them?

  “What did she write to you about?”

  “I burnt them. I can’t remember.” He genuinely can’t. Where are they? He can’t bear to think how she pleaded, how he couldn’t forgive her. If they’re in the house, Janet will find them, or Henry. It doesn’t matter. He feels this, too, slip from him.

  Janet knits, her needles clacking gently. She must be making a present for her brother, he realises. No one in Singapore would need a woollen scarf. It is dark blue, almost black, with splashes of light through it.

  “Has Henry—” He does not know how to continue. “Your brother, is he—”

  “He’s booked his plane ticket. I’ve got the dates written down. You’ll see him soon.”

  “Is he happy?”

  “You think I’d know that, just because we’re twins? Some sort of sixth sense?”

  “I thought you might have talked.”

  “You phone him more often than I do. I suppose he’s happy. Why wouldn’t he be? He has everything he wants.” The needles are made of bamboo, and sound like chopsticks when they click together.

  They sit for a while more. He cannot say how long, his sense of time has become totally untethered. He closes his eyes for a moment and is no longer sure if this is the same visit, or the next day. Janet’s scarf seems to be progressing at an impressive rate. If only there were a view in this room—the window opens into an airwell, making it impossible to tell the time of day from the quality of the light. He feels he should say something, but the words seem to be going altogether. He imagines them leaving his mind, one at a time, as they have been steadily. Goodbye, meaning. Goodbye, thought.

  Janet glances at her watch, and pulls The Daily Bread out of her bag. “Almost time,” she says, and reads the lesson for that day. As usual, it consists of a few verses from the Bible, then an anecdote translating them into a modern day parable. It is always the impatient businessman, the arrogant politician, ultimately humbled by the might of God.

  When she has finished, she waits for a few seconds, what she considers a contemplative pause. She does not expect her father to respond, but feels she must give him the opportunity. Perhaps he is praying. His body is completely still, his eyes shut. After a while, she realises he has died, and goes to fetch the doctor.

  2

  Siew Li

  When they were newly married and acquaintances asked how they’d met, Siew Li and Jason would smile and say something non-committal about being at the same school event many years back. How fortunate, with her from a Chinese-speaking background and him virtually monolingual in the Queen’s English; they inhabited such different worlds that if not for this one chance meeting, they might have gone their whole lives without encountering each other. What a loss that would have been, Jason would say, his hand possessively over his wife’s. After the children were born, they discussed how much to tell them, but with no real urgency. The story would work itself out.

  Later still, after all that was over, Siew Li had a lot of time to think about that meeting. About how much of her life, for all that it seemed chosen, had been determined by single moments of chance. If she’d stood in a different spot that day, Jason would never have seen her. If she’d gone home early like her mum had told her, Lina would never have spoken to her. And what would have happened to her life then? The Party told her that society would have to break free of its chains, that man’s enslavement of man would inevitably have to end. Yet deep down, she didn’t understand how they could be that certain about anything, when so much came down to happenstance.

  Towards the end of her life, she wrote these thoughts down in rambling letters, sometimes on paper, sometimes only in her head, addressed to both her children. The beginning was always the same: I hope you are healthy, I hope you are safe, I hope you have not been taught to hate me. Even if you have, try to understand. I made the decisions that seemed right, though at the time it didn’t feel like there were decisions to be made, that there was only ever one course of action. I must write in Chinese. If you ever see these words, would you even

  understand them?

  Just before their 15th birthday, which she wouldn’t live to see, she told them again about that first conversation with Lina. They’d heard this before, if they were getting these messages, but she wanted them to think about where they were now, at this age, and where she had been then. Perhaps that would help them to understand. Or perhaps not—and perhaps that was better. Part of her hoped they were doing so well, that they would never be able to see the world through her eyes.

  At the age of 14, Siew Li was old enough to ignore her mum’s instructions to come home early, and was wandering around Happy World on her own when Lina came up to her. Lina was one of the older girls from school, taller and more popular than Siew Li would ever be. One time, she’d been in the bathroom when Lina walked in, and even though it was crowded, the girls parted at once, quietly stepping aside for Lina to walk up to the mirrors, which she did without so much as a glance at the bodies around her.

  “Hey, you, I want to talk to you.” Lina said, by way of greeting.

  Siew Li was still young enough for this to be momentous, an older girl singling her out, but she decided to play it cool, nodding mutely in acknowledgement without looking too awestruck.

  “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

  “I’m not a child,” Siew Li muttered.

  “Just
joking, don’t be so sensitive.” Lina took a bite of lok-lok, little fried things on a stick.

  Uncertain if laughing was the right thing to do, she said nothing.

  Lina grinned. “Hey, if you’re not doing anything, come on the ghost train. I’ll pay.”

  Siew Li hesitated, and Lina abruptly swung round. “Boo!” She jumped. “Unless you’re scared.”

  “No. I mean, I’ll come.” It was a bit sad of her to be wandering around the amusement park alone, she thought. Better to be with someone. Then again, wasn’t Lina also alone?

  “My friends abandoned me,” said Lina conversationally, popping the last lok-lok into her mouth and tossing the bamboo skewer in a bin. “Stupid idiots, said they were going home to sleep, but I think they’re secretly meeting boyfriends or something. Hey, you ready?”

  The other people in the queue for the ghost train didn’t actually look scared. Most of them were couples, presumably wanting to be alone in the dark. Still, Siew Li felt a faint tickle of apprehension as the dumpy ticket collector lethargically took their little slips of paper and waved them on into the dark. They hunched into their allocated box, knees beneath the safety bar. The cars were spaced out enough that they couldn’t see anyone else, just an eerie silence as they sat in the gloom, waiting to set out.

  “Try not to wet yourself,” said Lina cheerfully as the rails clicked and they started moving. A quick ratchety climb, then a plunge fast enough to make both girls gasp. Halfway down, a hanging corpse plopped in front of them, dangling obscenely. Lina screamed with gusto, apparently in enjoyment. They plummeted towards its gruesome grin, which whisked out of their way just in time.

  “By the way,” said Lina at the next level stretch, “You know we need people for the organising committee, right? I didn’t see your name on the sign-up sheet. How come?”

  Siew Li gaped at her. “Yes, I know who you are,” said Lina, reading her mind. “You think just because we never talked, I don’t know? People are always pointing out to me—that Form Two girl, Siew Li, very smart, top of every exam, but keeps to herself. And I thought, how come someone like that isn’t helping to make things happen? That’s the sort of person we need in the movement.”

  Siew Li managed to nod without turning her head, but before she could say anything, a severed arm trailed its fingers along her shoulder, and cobweb strands wrapped themselves around her face. “Just think about it,” said Lina’s steady voice, and they were falling again, into velvety darkness that absorbed them without a sound.

  •

  For the first part of her life, Siew Li only knew progress. Admittedly, she was born during the war, which was a fairly low baseline—her earliest memories were of constant discomfort. Her mother didn’t like to talk about it afterwards, so she had to put the fragments together herself—a man, probably her father, running into the rubber plantation with her on his back when they heard the airplanes coming, only returning when the bombing stopped; the neighbours fighting over rations, hollow cheeks and the bow-legged walk of malnourishment creeping over everyone. She was four when the Occupation ended, so there was no context for any of these shards, just a sense that things had been terrible and then they got better, not only in concrete ways but also the sense of lightness, as if everyone had been holding their breath all this time and suddenly they had all the air they needed.

  It took her a while to realise her father wasn’t coming back. He’d gone away with the Japanese one day, and even after everything was back to what she assumed was normal, he didn’t show up. Her mum just cried when she asked, and one time slapped her, though she was sorry afterwards. Anyway, Siew Li learnt not to ask.

  The only thing she knew for sure was that the Party had been the only one fighting back. Later, when she saw photos of the British being taken prisoner, the straggly line of pallid men and women being marched east to Changi, she was struck by how ineffectual they looked, how easily they must have toppled as soon as they were challenged. By contrast, the Ma Gong, the Communists, were stealthy, operating in the cover of the jungle. No one knew how many of them there were, only that they were the one force the enemy still feared. And after the surrender, in the three weeks it took the British to return, they were the ones who kept order. The British stayed for a long time after that, trying to pretend the last few years hadn’t happened, or that they’d been a mistake and this was the natural order reasserting itself. Some people went along with it, but mostly it seemed clear they were on their way out.

  That was her childhood understanding, which she saw nothing to challenge as she got older. These were the agreed-upon facts on Kreta Ayer Road, where everyone spoke Chinese in one dialect or another, and the doings of the English elite seemed to come from a great distance away. One or two people they knew were trying to cram their children full of the foreign language, so they could go to the schools with fancy ang moh names and maybe get into the civil service, but that seemed incomprehensible to most right-thinking people—not just because the British surely couldn’t be around much longer, but also who would want to raise kids unable to speak to their parents?

  Siew Li’s mother was glad her daughter was young enough that her schooling hadn’t been touched by the war, unlike those in their late teens or as old as twenty only now returning to the classroom. Even better, Siew Li hadn’t been forced to learn Japanese, the occupier’s language. So why would I want her to learn English now, she was fond of saying, wouldn’t that be just the same? She only had a primary school education herself, and was determined that her daughter would do better. She pushed Siew Li to study hard, to come back early and go over her homework instead of playing zero point with the other girls in the alleyway. Even when Siew Li’s books passed the point her mother could understand them, she was happy just to see her daughter staring hard at them, making marks with her pencil.

  When Siew Li got into Nanyang Girls’, her mother was nothing as demonstrative as thrilled, just quietly proud. The very best school, in her eyes. Those crisp white uniforms. All that history. There’d been that unpleasant incident when some students flung acid in their principal’s face, but there are bad apples in every community, and they probably did sincerely believe she was a government stooge. The years after the war were rough for everyone, and things seemed to be calming down. She thought her daughter would be all right.

  For her own part, Siew Li was happy enough to be in a good school—or rather, not having a clue what one school meant over another, she was happy that her mum was pleased. It was a long bus ride to King’s Road, but she enjoyed those stretches of time, nothing to do but read till she got carsick, then stare out the window without taking in anything in particular. She didn’t have many friends—too many of the girls felt like they were from a different world, from the big houses around Bukit Timah, with their businessman dads and tai-tai mothers. Even the ones with less money, like her, seemed somehow sharper, as if they knew things about the world she did not. On her first day at school, she’d tried to talk to the girl at the next desk, but then the conversation had turned to popular music. “You haven’t heard of Yao Lee?” sneered the girl. “You must be really stupid.” That pretty much set the tone for her life at this school, which was why she knew no one and was wandering round Happy World on her own.

  It wasn’t that she needed friends, as that she wanted to be a part of this thing that was happening. She had a sense of something big coming, a huge shift in the way the world was ordered, made possible by the chaos of war. Her childhood fantasies had been of heroism. If only she’d been old enough, during the war, what wouldn’t she have done! Withstood torture, like Elizabeth Choy or Sybil Kathigasu. Gone into the jungle and waged guerrilla warfare, like those brave people in Force 136 and others whose names would never be known. She learnt all the stories.

  Only now was it striking her that she was in her own time, the only vantage point she had. She knew what was happening around her, had even been present at the May Thirteenth incident, so many of them gathered
to support the boys taking a stance against the government, which was conscripting them without taking into account that their education would be interrupted. The police had turned violent without provocation, and she had no doubt that the government saw people like them as worth less, if not worthless. It was important to fight back. What was she actually doing?

  It was easy to stay in a cocoon, unless someone sliced you free. And if this happened at the right moment, you emerged fully fledged, a new being. The first tug at the silk thread, the first unravelling, came when Lina spoke to her that night at Happy World.

  •

  The ride couldn’t be all that long—there was only so far to go, even looping round themselves, in a space this small—but she felt herself losing her sense of time and movement in the dark. “I mean, what do you want to do with yourself?” came Lina’s voice. “Learn shorthand and become a typist or something? Some other boring job?”

  Siew Li bit back a smart-aleck retort and muttered something about not knowing what else to do, needing to support her mum, uncertain times.

  “That’s the point.” A skeleton did a quick jig in front of them, unhinged its jaw and raised a jerky arm as if about to eat it. “The world is changing, can’t you feel it? Of course nothing is certain. We need to keep up the pressure, otherwise it’s too easy for the people in charge to forget we exist. Which side of history do you want to be on?”

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  “Isn’t it? Once you know the right thing to do, what else is there to think about?”

  “Not everyone thinks this is right.”

  “They’re too used to the wrong situation. Until now, it’s been the British in charge, and the ones who try to be like them. But this isn’t their country. They say we should be grateful, but for what? Being exploited? They weren’t trying to help us, they came here to steal from us. They need us. Their country is so much smaller—”