Bad Fruit, page 20
Beyond two teaspoons, the juice turns pale, that kick of acid neutralized by cream. I make up a fresh glass, put the croissant on a pink Peranakan bowl and take it upstairs.
She is sitting up, her hair spread out upon the pillows, whispering to Sapphire. She is so like a child, dwarfed by the enormity of her bed, her billowing nightie, that I feel muddled, why am I punishing her again? But then she gestures impatiently at me, and I remember.
“So?” She tucks Sapphire under the silk quilt next to her and sets the tray across her thighs. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“I’m sorry, Mama.” I sit on the edge of her bed.
She inches the end of the croissant into her mouth. Croissants were the invention of local bakers to celebrate Vienna’s victory over invading Turks, to eat one was to devour enemy forces (the Turkish flag still has a crescent moon). I watch her take bite after bite, each one, a declaration of future victory. But I will not be devoured.
Her lips are powdered with sugar as she picks at stray almond flakes. When her plate is clear, she pulls my hair, not hard, but enough to force me to bend my head toward her. “You’ve dyed your roots. Finally.”
Not a child, I think. Not a child at all.
She squeezes my chin, checks my lenses in the low, curtained light. “Good, good.” She gives me a little push. “You need to apologize to your father for what you said about the car accident. He was very worried.”
“Yes, Mama.” My face is stone.
“It’s a good plan, don’t you think, moving to Oxford? Good for a fresh start. Your father came up with it.”
Inside me, mines explode. Was it really his idea? He wants to keep me a child, forever preserved as Mama’s girl, Mama’s doll, while he hunts out new vistas to enjoy his Peronis. Or is this another tactic to divide us, keep us doubting one another, hating one another? My heart says fight, but my mind says wait, watch. Her fingers are curled around the glass. My voice is an automaton’s. “I think it’s a great idea. Give us time to mend relationships. Be a family again.”
She drinks the juice like she always does, gulping it down, so thirsty, then hands me the empty tray. “Right, up, up, up. We don’t want to miss our appointments.”
* * *
OUTSIDE THE BATHROOM, I wait for the low groan—there it is. She calls to me quietly, the pain stealing the pitch of her voice—but I don’t go to her, I let her say my name for five glorious minutes, a wild, reckless joy trilling through me. Only when she’s given up, do I compose myself and knock on the door. “Mama?”
She doesn’t reply.
“I’m coming in.”
The smell is overpowering. I hold the inside of my elbow over my nose. She’s on the toilet, but she’s slumped backward, her head lolling against the cistern, her skin grayed and clammy. I blink my eyes to take this photo. Click.
“Are you all right, Mama?”
No response. Click.
“You don’t look well.” I flush the toilet. The sound rouses her, her eyes flutter open, but her gaze is bleary and unfocused.
“Can you stand?”
She puts her hand against the sorbet pink wall, her other hand reaches for me. “Help me back to bed.”
I put her nightie back on and lead her under the covers.
“Cancel the viewings,” she whispers.
I’ve won.
I want to run around in loops, howl, telegraph my triumph to the world. Nothing beats the brokenness of an enemy, the sweet twist of everything suddenly going your way.
* * *
IT’S LATE IN the afternoon. Mama’s been asleep for hours. I’m still jubilant at purchasing this entire afternoon of peace. This is more reliable than making Peranakan food, much less effort than retelling invented childhood stories. I could titrate the dose, sprinkle a little more when she’s being annoying, constantly adjusting and readjusting the quantity of that precious powder in spoilt juice, snacks, dinners. Her turn to be Lily’s girl, Lily’s doll.
“Her stomach’s playing up. She can’t go,” I announced to Daddy earlier.
“Oh.” He didn’t bother to mask his relief, and I wonder if it was really his idea to move to Oxford or if that was just another one of Mama’s lies. “I did need to check on something in the lab,” and that was him gone too. I spent the day on the sofa reading The Wonders of Language, gorging on all the things she can’t eat—a cheese platter, triple-chocolate ice cream, slices of coffee cake.
I get a message from Francie, Are you OK? Jay told me you were in a fight with your mother, and one from Julia, How’s it going?
I ignore Francie and give Julia a thumbs-up emoji and a high five.
Daddy slams the door when he comes home. My fault. I should have told him to come in quietly. I hear her voice. “Lily?” She’s stronger now, there’s only a wisped undertow of weakness.
I roll my eyes at him and head up the stairs.
Her room glows a little with the sun setting behind the shut curtains. “Did you cancel the estate agents?”
I shake my head. “I couldn’t get into your emails, and I didn’t want to wake you.” I stroke her hair. “How are you feeling?”
Mama tuts, annoyed at herself. “Fine, fine, what was going on with that croissant? From Gabrielle’s, right? They’re usually a little painful, but not like that.”
“Must be something wrong with the recipe. Was it really bad this time?”
She hugs her stomach protectively. “Very bad, much worse than I’ve had it before.”
I ache to smile.
“Can you reply to those estate agents and apologize about missing those appointments? Ask if they can rearrange for the weekend.”
“The weekend?”
She props Sapphire up against the pillows. “We have to view quickly if everything’s going to be ready before your term starts. First week of October, right?” She types her password into her laptop and passes it to me. “Email them while I take a bath.”
This isn’t going to end, is it? I can’t poison her every time she tries to visit Oxford. She’ll find out.
I stare at Angela’s confirmation of the appointments, scrolling numbly up and down the email chain when something catches my eye. Mama’s original email to Angela is dated the day after she got back from Santorini.
Moving to Oxford was never a punishment for running away or the scene yesterday. This was always the plan. My rebellion is merely an excuse to tighten the reins, to explain the inexplicable: Mama was never going to let me go.
My phone rings, a foreign number.
“Hello?”
“Hello, is that Lily?” The voice on the other end is confident, a little gruff.
“Speaking.”
“This is Rachel, Rachel Tan, calling about your email.”
I go to Julia’s bedroom, shut the door, recall my Singaporean manners—treat everyone older than you like they’re part of your family, call older women “Auntie.” “Hello Auntie, thank you for calling back.”
“No problem, no problem.”
I haven’t heard the lilted Singaporean accent for months. I press my phone to my ear to make sure I catch everything she’s saying.
“Are you at the National University of Singapore?”
I consider saying “yes” to make my questions more legitimate, but I don’t want to be caught out, she might know someone there. “No, Auntie. I’m at school.”
“I thought so, you sound young. You’re not Singaporean though?”
My accent has already marked me out as someone different. I need to feed her the right mix of truth and lies. “No, I’m from London.”
“London, huh. And your school is making you do a project?”
This woman is sharp—I’m not going to pull the wool easily over her eyes. I need something else in my arsenal, something to help me get past her walls. The deception comes to me easily, after all, I have a lot of material for a convincing story. Here you go, Auntie, this is a Mama’s girl special, half-truth, half-lie. “Auntie,” I make sure my voice breaks a little, “my mother is … was Singaporean, she was Peranakan. Before she died, she took me to Singapore, showed me Joo Chiat. Your house was our favorite. After she died, I wanted to do my own project on your house, to honor her, our Peranakan heritage. If you cannot help me, it’s OK, I understand, but if you could, I’d be so grateful.”
She interrogates me a little more on how I found her details, why I like Peranakan shophouses, but the gruffness is gone, she’ll answer my questions.
“Well, the house has been in my family for generations. It’s been through fire, it’s been through war, do they teach you about the Japanese occupation of Singapore or just the Nazis?”
The fire. I am so close. Slowly, go slowly. “Just the Nazis, Auntie, but my mother told me about it. But the house was set on fire?”
“Oh yes, when I was only a girl.”
“How did it start?”
“No one knows. My mother thought my uncle started it; he was staying with us for a while after his wife died. He started drinking a lot.”
Mama’s Baba drank a lot before that too.
“My father thought it was thieves because things were missing. Not a lot, a small amount of money, one of my grandmother’s tingkats.”
“A tingkat?” I slip out of Julia’s room, pad down the stairs and into the kitchen.
“Yes, a tingkat, very rare, an antique. My grandmother collected them, she had maybe twenty, thirty. She displayed them behind glass cabinets in the dining room.”
Clutching the phone between my ear and shoulder, I haul myself up onto the kitchen counter and reach for my mother’s most precious possession.
“I don’t think they really knew what they were taking, maybe just snatched one as they went past, but the one they took was priceless. Blue flowers on white porcelain with gold handles shaped like bamboo.”
I trace the blue flowers.
“… and the house, it was made of wood, the furniture was made of wood, the back burned quickly.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“My Uncle Jimmy died. His daughter also, my cousin. They never found her body. She was only eight. Tragedy after tragedy, my uncle’s side of the family.”
My voice is the smallest whisper. “What was your cousin’s name?”
“Meilin Tan.”
Meilin.
Mei.
May.
Mama.
I drop the tingkat. The bottom layer smashes first as it hits the kitchen counter and then the top two layers slide off, splintering against the floor tiles. All that is whole among the blue-patterned shards is the gold, bamboo handle, and then the reel of Mama’s past shudders into motion.
After he cut her, there was stuffing all over the floor. Goldie lay facedown. The girl couldn’t see how bad it was until she turned the teddy over. She made sure she looked straight at Goldie’s glass eyes not at the hole where her nose used to be.
“It looks fine,” she told her.
Goldie didn’t believe the girl. She buried her head in her arms, frightened of scissors, of open shut, open shut, of him.
The girl picked up the nose her father had cut off. “I’ll get him back.”
“How?” Goldie asked.
The girl stroked the teddy’s face, her fingers slipping into the cigarette burns he’d bored into her fur. His gold lighter, flicking, always flicking, she hated it. “With his lighter.”
“When?”
The girl knew what he was doing, it hadn’t changed now that they had been staying at her uncle’s, because he always did the same thing after he finished with her mother, and now, after he finished with her: he’d be napping in his bedroom, cradling a bottle of whiskey. It was a good time. Everyone was out. “I want to get something from downstairs, and then I’ll do it. Now.”
There was a fire.
My grandfather died.
But it wasn’t an accident.
My mother started it.
My phone is in the tingkat smithereens, I can hear Rachel on the line, she asks if I can hear her, if I’m there, and then the dial tone. I don’t pick it up.
I know two things.
I know my mother is insane, that she has been for a very long time.
And I know how to break her.
31 / SAPPHIRE
I CREEP BACK TO MAMA’S room. The bath has stopped running, the air filled with the citrus notes of her bath oil. My mother is soaking all her aches and pains away. I hear the slow splashes of her arms moving, the shower gel squirting out, and then the low, insistent scrape of a loofah against her back, scritch, scratch, scritch, scratch. My mind scratches. I have dressed, fed, loved a murderer for such a long time.
I peer through the doorway to glance at her. She stares at her left foot as she scrubs, the pink pedicured toenails turning the hot water tap absently on and off, on and off. She is humming, not a song, just a sound, an expression of contentment, like a daydreaming child, but that doesn’t steer me from my course. Children can kill.
I step back and search the room until I find what I’m looking for. The scissors Mama used to cut her swimsuit are on the shelf of her bedside table, stuffed into a roll of shredded nylon. I pull it out like a sword from a scabbard and take the scissors on the slow walk around the bed to the window seat of teddies, those rows of mini Goldies. The blades sound clean against their noses. Destruction is astonishing, the flashing beauty of open-shut.
“What are you doing?” Behind me, Mama stands up in the bath. Water runs off her. She screams at the rows of faceless teddies, a primitive cry, the sound of a mother coming upon the rending of her cubs.
I grab Sapphire, hold the scissors to her neck. “Don’t come any closer.”
Daddy rushes in, torn between Mama’s shouting and the teddy dangling from my fist. “Give me the scissors, Lily.”
His intervention decides it. I drive the blades into Sapphire’s back, slice her from arse to throat, and then I’m at her face, ripping through her snout. Mama hurls herself at me, wet towel, wet skin, snarling, biting, trying to wrest my fingers off, but I don’t loosen my grip with one hand, the other snatching out handfuls of stuffing from paws, stomach, brain. My head is exploding, I love it. She’ll never be able to repair her. No more comfort for you, Mama, no more.
Mama rears back and then keels over.
“What’s wrong with you?” roars Daddy. “Are you crazy?”
“Not as crazy as she is!” I try to push past him to get to her, but he grabs my arms so hard I think he’ll break it, but that doesn’t matter. I have my tongue—that’s still a blade. “I know all her mixed-up lies. I know what she did!”
Daddy shakes me. “What are you talking about?”
Tears stream hotly down my face. “Her family never owned the emerald house. And her mother did die in a car accident, but that wasn’t the end of it, was it, Mama?”
Mama covers her mouth with her hand, a desperate attempt to stop the spill of secrets, but they aren’t spilling out from her, they’re spilling out from me, and I will say all of them, every last one. “There was a fire. The one her father died in. You think she was such a clever child, right Daddy, smart little girl, running away instead of hiding, but it wasn’t because she was clever. She ran away because she started it. She murdered her father.”
The light in my mother’s eyes dies.
I’ve broken her.
I wait for a beat of triumph, but it doesn’t come. I summon it, I wanted this, I wanted this, but something is very wrong, not with Mama, but with me, with the way I am strangling Sapphire’s neck, the way her black eyes bulge out of the empty carcass of her head. There was another bear whose eyes bulged out. No, no, stop, I don’t want to know, but I am powerless to stop another flashback.
“I like you in a sarong kebaya,” her father said, opening the door. “It suits you, little nonya. But such an ugly face.” He set down his lighter and his whiskey bottle, but the cigarette still burned in his mouth and then, in two strides, he was standing in front of the girl.
“Always with that stupid bear,” he mumbled, and then he grabbed Goldie. “What is it about this bear that you like so much? This face?”
He turned Goldie toward the girl and she didn’t like it, how Goldie’s eyes bulged because he squeezed her head so tight. “Want a cigarette, bear? Here, here.” He took out his cigarette and pressed the lit end against her mouth, against her head. The girl screamed, jumped up to wrench her back. Her father laughed. “You love this bear more than me? More than your Baba?”
The girl doesn’t remember what she said. Only that it wasn’t enough to make him stop.
“You’ll learn.” He took a pair of scissors and cut the teddy bear’s nose off, open shut, open shut. The stuffing came out of her like a blizzard.
“Come here.”
The girl wet herself.
“Take off your clothes.”
The girl didn’t fight him like her mother used to. She lay still, reaching, reaching until she found Goldie’s paw. Hand in hand, they went through the rooms of herself turning everything off.
Wait, wait, he raped Mama too?
My Mama?
“Mama?”
She is curled against the wardrobe, her fists balled up in front of her face.
“Did he hurt you?”
She makes the sound of a frightened animal.
Words dribble out of my mouth. “I didn’t know, I didn’t know he did that to you. I didn’t know what Goldie meant, I wouldn’t have done that if I’d known!” but rows of holed faces condemn me, the glimmering, bulging eyes of Sapphire.
“What shall I do with her?” Daddy asks Mama.
Mama’s voice is thin and strange. “Take off her clothes.”
There is a moment of confusion when Daddy thinks he’s misheard. He glances at Mama for confirmation, she gives him a small nod, and then there’s a pause, he won’t do it, no way; he hasn’t helped her like this before, why would he do it now, and then things happen very quickly. He pulls my jumper over my head with one arm, the other, a vice across my ribs. The shock of his hands on me makes me freeze. I cannot comprehend it, but he is stripping off my T-shirt. I kick out at him, at Mama, my feet trampling air. I fight, scream, scratch, twist to be free, clutching at fleeting triumphs—his skin under my nails, his feet squirming under my stamps, but they’re millimeter gains, he’s got it off. He falters at the clasp of my bra, shame perhaps, his fingers thick and clumsy, but after excruciating seconds, it springs open and then he wrenches my sweatpants and knickers down together. All my fight goes to covering the dark triangle of hair between my legs, my breasts.
