Written in Black, page 3
Chapter Three
The panes of the glass door trembled as we crossed over. My father came to a halt a few steps into the house, as soon as he saw Ah Kong.
My grandfather lay on a platform draped in white silk in the middle of my uncle’s living room. At his feet were an altar bearing a black-and-white framed photograph, an urn holding the remains of many burnt-out joss sticks, and a tray proffering a selection of his favourite foods and spirits. On the floor beside my grandfather lay a metal basin containing a burning circle of folded paper pieces, placed atop a mound of ash. Ah Peh was crouched over it, adding new pieces to the front of the paper-chain as the fire worked its way forwards, and making sure that it kept going on and on in endless circles.
It was going to take me some convincing that this thing in front of me used to be my grandfather. From where I was, it seemed as if a mannequin or a wax dummy, lifeless and pale, had been laid out on the platform. Was that really Ah Kong? Sure, it resembled him, but something was very … very “off” about it. Something that wouldn’t let me believe that what I was seeing was real. On the other hand, the photograph of him on the altar was a lot closer to how he had looked when he had been alive. But it was only a black-and-white shot, and probably one that had been taken from around the time I was born.
As we walked in, I couldn’t help wondering about the necessity for this grand funeral. Considering that my grandfather was no longer living, and had no way of knowing or seeing what was happening here, why did we have to stage this elaborate ceremony around his body? I looked to Pa, ready with the question, but then bottled it away, realising that he wouldn’t be too amused by my questions now.
Well, if there had to be a ceremony, Ah Kong was certainly dressed for it. His corpse was draped in a fine black suit and trouser set and had been fitted with a pair of Italian shoes; I could tell because the soles were emblazoned with the words “Armany” and “Definitely Made in Italy”.
I looked around my uncle’s living room, taking in the changes that had been made for the funeral. The spacious hall, twice the size of ours, just as the house was, had once boasted of not one but three coffee tables, each accompanied by its own circle of settees and armchairs, yet leaving enough room for a piano, multiple cabinets, and side tables that displayed photos of Ah Peh with various businessmen and government bigwigs as well as his daughter’s numerous music awards, not to mention the countless bone-china ornaments that we kids were absolutely forbidden from touching.
The living room’s current state was unrecognisable; it had been extensively rearranged to accommodate the platform, where Ah Kong lay, and the space around it, where Ah Peh was sat, thus confining the common seating area into a small and tight space. And gone were the ornaments, the pictures and the artwork, including the knock-off Mona Lisa that Ah Peh especially liked to show off to me.
My uncle greeted us from the floor. He was a slightly larger replica of my father, but with less hair and a very prominent set of buck-teeth.
“Seng,” he said flatly, setting his overwrought, cavernous eyes on us.
“Hello, Ah Peh,” we recited in unison.
“Go pay respect to your Ah Kong,” he instructed.
Pa had already started on the joss sticks. Aaron bit his lip eagerly, hoping to use the matchbox, but he could dream on. I was still not allowed to light matches, and my little brother was mistaken if he thought he could jump the queue for that privilege.
We collected the smouldering sticks from our father, a pair for each of us, and got in line behind him. Pa stood in front of my grandfather and held out his two sticks with both hands, moving them up and down in prayer slowly. The incense that emanated from their glowing tips tickled my nose and throat, prompting me to hold my own joss sticks as far away from myself as possible. I looked up, following the smoke as it wafted up to the ceiling, and saw that it was making a conspicuous dark stain above the altar.
Once Pa was done, it was Jen’s turn. She followed his example, but prayed out loud.
“Ah Kong, it’s Jen … Uh, I want to say how much I’ll … I’ll miss you …”
I cringed as I listened to her stumble through her speech, sounding unrehearsed and unmistakably saddened by our grandfather’s death, but not quite tearful yet.
“Come on, do it properly,” I whispered. The suggestion was meant more for my own ears, but was nonetheless picked up by her very sharp pair. She turned around and glared at me but got the hint. She cut her speech short then planted her joss sticks in the urn.
“Wait, Jennifer,” my uncle called out just as she was about to walk away. “Come and kiss your Ah Kong. The eldest child must do it. And since Michael is not here, you must.”
“Wh-what?” Jen exclaimed, none too enthused. She turned to our father for support, but he simply motioned for her to get on with the ritual.
Gingerly, she moved up to the head of the platform. She looked down and put an apprehensive hand on Ah Kong’s brow, touching it ever so gently. Then, she began bending over, lowering her upper body with all the pace of a construction crane shifting its dangling, teetering load. Her lips glanced against Ah Kong’s pallid skin, and suddenly she was bolt upright. I held my breath, waiting for something horrible to happen, for Ah Kong to jump off the platform and attack Jen like a hungry zombie. But nothing happened. Jen simply walked away from our grandfather’s body.
I was next in line. I’d never been a fan of praying out loud, so I tried to do it in my head. I drew a blank; no, there was nothing I could think of, offhand, that would fit the moment perfectly. So, with three shakes of my joss sticks, I stepped aside to allow my brother to say or think his piece.
“Seng, is Michael coming?” my uncle asked my father when Aaron was finished. Pa shook his head.
“Ehh … How can he not come? That boy … His grandfather loved him so much, and he can’t be bothered to turn up for his funeral?”
None of us answered him. Michael’s parting of ways with us was still a taboo topic, and Pa seemed reluctant to discuss my brother’s absence with Ah Peh.
“It’s on his shoulders. I’ve washed my hands of him,” he said simply. “Ming isn’t here yet?”
Ming was our aunt, who was much younger than her brothers and who worked in a bank in town. She was married but had no children, and she lived almost an hour’s drive from this part of Brunei so we never saw her much outside of the usual get-togethers. She didn’t tend to give out presents very often to us kids either, so any talk about her never interested me or Aaron. Plus, she had some really strange interests that she never seemed able to stop yammering about. I’d have figured that with all the self-improvement crap she was into, she’d have realised by now that a big step in the right direction would be to actually pay attention to what others felt and shut up for once.
“No, she’s still in Singapore. She’s arriving tomorrow.” Ah Peh shifted his attention to Aaron and me. “Why don’t you all say hello to your Ah Ma? Go on in, to the kitchen …”
We walked past the living room and through the small hallway that led into the house’s dining-area-cum-dry-kitchen. My grandmother was sitting there in her wheelchair, and beside her was my uncle’s wife, Vivian.
“Hello, Ah Ma. Hello, Ah Em,” Aaron and I said in chorus.
Ah Ma looked vacantly in our direction and said nothing. She hadn’t said much in the years since her stroke. Ah Em, who normally left the grandma-tending to her servant, was currently pressed so close against the older woman that a significant portion of her body was in the wheelchair as well, her ample arm engulfing Ah Ma’s shoulders, her fluffy bouffant hair and a tear-stained cheek squished tightly against my grandmother’s crinkled forehead. The tears were making Ah Em’s ultra-thick mascara and face powder run like poster paint, and some of it was even smudged into her lipstick.
“Oh, you boys, come over here!” cried Ah Em. She grabbed Aaron into a crushing embrace then planted a sloppy kiss on his forehead while he struggled to free himself.
“Your poor, poor grandfather,” she cooed, releasing Aaron and imploring me to come into her arms. I held my ground, shifting my gaze from those fat death-traps to my brother, who was in the process of vigorously wiping her lipstick off his forehead.
Ah Em’s considerable height (she stood just a bit taller than her husband) was evident even while she was sitting. When she got up, she loomed over Ah Ma, her formidable hairdo framing her face like a lion’s mane.
“And you poor, poor children! Your mother couldn’t come back, could she? Oh dear …”
I was relieved that she had given up on hugging me.
“Mum is still not well enough,” I answered.
“And what about Michael? Why isn’t he here?”
“He’s not coming. Let it be on his conscience,” I repeated my father’s words.
“What?”
“Er, well, that’s what my father said anyway,” I added sheepishly.
Ah Em turned to Ah Ma. “Ah Ma. Le tia, boh? Ah Seng geh kia …” she said to our grandmother, each gentle syllable accompanied by soft nudges that nonetheless managed to send Ah Ma swaying in her chair like a puppet dangling from strings. It was sad to see her like this. I didn’t remember too much of what she had been like when she still had her marbles, but I could recollect images of a kindly, soft spoken woman, sometimes with a cigarette in hand, watching over a much younger me as I played in the garden. I could even remember writing an essay about her when I was six, and had ended up reading it out loud in the school annual show; it had included gems such as “My grandma is very old and she eats many pills everyday to stay healthy”. The whole thing had come up to only a few sentences, and it hadn’t made much sense either, but I must have liked her enough to have done it in the first place.
“Can she hear you?” I blurted out.
“Oh, she can hear, Jonathan!” Ah Em nodded. “She’s very sad. It’s so very sad …”
She was snorting into a crumpled tissue when Pa and Jen walked into the kitchen. They seemed unmoved by Ah Em’s theatrics.
“You three. Go up and put your bags away,” our father instructed.
“Yes, children, go upstairs …” Ah Em made a show of composing herself. “Jen, you can sleep in Frida’s room. Jonathan and Aaron, in Kevin’s room. Go on up. They’re waiting for you.”
“They’re so brave. It’s their third loss this year …” I overheard Ah Em sniffle to Pa on our way out. She never could resist saying this line, or any one of its many variants, every time she saw us. And she always said it when we were leaving a room or were just out of sight but still within earshot, as if she wanted us to hear it but think that she didn’t know that we had overheard her. I used to find it weird but now I simply disregarded it, much like I did anything she had to say.
Kevin was upstairs in the play area, again twice the size of the one in my house. He was where he could usually be found, lounging on the couch and reading a comic. The 60” TV in front of him was on, as was the PC placed beside the broken snooker table, which had been re-engineered into a fully-functional, and fully occupied, Lego display. The room’s air was frosty, thanks to the air-conditioner being set to full blast.
My guess was that he’d got bored of channel surfing a while ago; the television was playing BBC World, an unlikely choice for my brain-dead nine-year-old cousin.
“That’s terrible, isn’t it?” I remarked, flopping onto the chair next to his. Aaron remained standing, seemingly more interested in watching the two of us than the TV.
“What’re they tearing all those trees down for?” I said, pointing to the television screen. The show was on Peruvian natives losing their homes to loggers.
My cousin shrugged absentmindedly, his pudgy, bowlcut-haired head still stuck in his comic. He stuck a hand into a packet of corn chips that lay beside him and shoved a few pieces into his mouth. Crumbs spilled onto his upper lip and nose as he devoured them, his upturned nostrils twitching with each bite. Mouth still half full, his face suddenly turned into a frown. His hand then shot back into the bag and began rummaging around.
“I thought there was supposed to be a toy in here …” he moaned. I gave him an impatient sigh and gestured to my bag.
“Oh right …” Kevin finally realised what he was supposed to do and set his comic and bag of chips aside. He licked his fingers clean and got up. “Want to put your stuff in?”
“Yeah, thanks,” I answered, and my brother and I followed him into his room.
Kevin’s room was what our dreams were made of, down to the tiniest detail. He had a massive study table, a swivel chair, two cupboards crammed with manga, a laptop, a water bazooka, a toy display shelf, pool cues, a dartboard, a blackboard, a whiteboard, a kickboard, and about a million board games, most of them stacked in a pile in a corner, still unopened. As always, I was unable to peel myself away from all his incredible stuff, staring around the room and feeling a mixture of breathless wonder and bitter envy.
“Just drop your bag there.”
I left my rucksack propped up against one of the cupboards, while Kevin plopped himself onto his chair and gave himself a little twist. The sight of his rotund form twirling atop the slender leg of the chair almost made me crack up. If only he had on a blue and green shirt, then he would have made for a spitting image of a spinning globe.
“So, Ah Kong’s gone …” I said, composing myself.
“Yeah, I know.” Kevin flipped through the exercise books on his desk absentmindedly.
“How’s Ah Ma?”
He shrugged. “You saw her downstairs, didn’t you?”
“Right … What about your father?”
Kevin didn’t answer. Instead, he made eyes at my rucksack.
“What games did you bring along?”
“I didn’t bring any.”
“Why not?”
“You’ve got more games than me. What makes you think I’d have something you don’t already have?” I said curtly.
“Kevin, what’s that?” Aaron, who’d been a silent observer so far, was heading towards our cousin’s bed. On it was a magic talking board, occupying centre stage on the lower half of his bunk bed, lying amidst an army of assorted action figures and toy cars.
“Don’t! You can’t use it now,” Kevin yelled as Aaron reached out to touch the board. “We’re having a funeral in the house, you know.”
Aaron stared back at us blankly.
“It’s used to talk to spirits,” I explained.
“Wow! We can use it to talk to Ah Kong then! Ask him what heaven is like and all that … Let’s use it now, come on!” Aaron was grinning excitedly.
“No! You can’t use it during a funeral. It’s not safe!” Kevin repeated then got off his chair. He picked it up and set the board on the top bunk of his bed, away from Aaron, making it clear that my brother wasn’t allowed to touch it.
“But I want to try …” Aaron begged. “Please, Kevin!”
“No. You can’t use it.”
What was up with Kevin? For someone who’d been rather close to Ah Kong, he didn’t seem all that keen on using this opportunity to contact our recently deceased grandfather. It was also odd that he wasn’t letting Aaron play with his new gadget. Kevin almost never missed a chance to show off his latest toys to us less fortunate cousins.
“Have you played with it before?” I myself was intrigued by the concept of the board.
“You can’t use it either!”
“I was just asking.”
“Well, obviously I have!”
“Did it work?”
“Uh, sorta … Look, I’m not going to let you guys play with it now, okay? Ah Kong’s body is right there downstairs!”
“Wouldn’t that make it easier to talk to him?” I challenged. “His spirit’s probably hanging around here somewhere …”
“No! There are no spirits here!” Kevin insisted. “It’s … uh … Let’s not do it out of respect for him, okay? Besides, playing with it would be just plain dangerous for you two anyway. You have weaker chi than me and might get taken away by them.”
“The spirits can take you away?” Aaron sounded spooked.
“No, they can’t,” I scoffed. “He’s just talking rubbish.”
“Oh yeah? What about Peter Poo ‘Pants’? He and Mos came over a few weeks ago. A spirit called John Major wanted Pants to reveal the password to his e-mail account, and when he said no, the spirit used its powers to make him shit himself. Right where you’re standing.”
I immediately leaped a good metre or so to the side. “Eww! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Relax, it was cleaned up. But he shit so much that he almost died and got taken away by the spirits. So that’s the true power of the board, if you’re not strong enough to resist it.”
“Really?” I was skeptical. “But it was Peter Poo. Since when doesn’t he shit himself anywhere but the toilet?”
“This was different. I told you, he shit so much that he almost passed out. Mos definitely fainted from the smell. Oh, there was so much on the floor and on his clothes …”
“Alright, enough!” I yelled.
“I don’t want to play with it anymore …” Aaron mumbled. Guess that story changed his mind.
“That makes two of us,” I agreed, before trying to change the subject. “So, how’re we sleeping tonight?”
After a heated discussion, the three of us came up with an arrangement that had Aaron taking the floor and me taking the bottom bunk of the bed. We then headed downstairs for dinner. We were to assemble at the same table where Ah Ma and Ah Em had been sitting at earlier on, and in accordance with our family’s custom, we kids were going to have our dinner before the adults.
Jen and Frida, Kevin’s sister, were already seated there when we arrived. Frida smiled faintly at us as we sat down, with just the right amount of polite acknowledgement. While not the best of friends, Jen got along with Frida better than she did a lot of other people. It probably helped that our families never pitted the two of them against one another, in the way our parents often compared school results between Kevin and me. Of course, that was probably because, in the eyes of Ah Em and Ah Peh, Jen wasn’t even a worthy rival to their daughter.
