Written in Black, page 5
That did kind of make sense. But I knew the adults wouldn’t be too thrilled with our plan. Aaron and I looked at each other, unsure of what we should do.
“Or are you guys too scared? Are you two chicken or what?”
“I’m not scared. I’ve been there before,” I said.
“Then, come on. Don’t be a spoilsport. Let’s go!”
“Yeah, Jonathan, let’s go,” Aaron joined in.
“What? You too? I don’t even know if we’re allowed to go in there.”
“Chicken! Bock, bock, bock …” Kevin flapped his arms and made clucking sounds at me.
“Hey! I’m not, okay. Stop it! Fine! I’ll go, I’ll go …” I still wasn’t sure what sort of game Kevin was playing, but I wasn’t going to stand there and let him call me chicken.
It didn’t take us long to get to Ah Kong’s room, but we all stopped at the closed door, each of us expectantly eyeing the others and wondering who’d crack first. I was a bit surprised when Kevin made the first move, putting his hand on the doorknob without any encouragement from us. He gave it a twist, and the door let out a mechanical groan. The three of us froze as if we had set off a bomb. We looked back nervously for any sign that we’d attracted the attention of the adults; when we were confident that no-one had noticed, we went inside.
Aaron switched on the lights, revealing Ah Kong’s small and rather bare room, which seemed to shrink and keep shrinking under the illumination of the circular, white fluorescent ceiling lamp. The smell of camphor mixed with talcum baby powder filled my nostrils, along with a hint of that nasty green herbal soap that my parents forced me to use every time I complained of an itch. But smells aside, all there was of any note in the room were a small table, curtains with plain floral patterns, and a bed stripped bare of linen. Most of Ah Kong’s belongings had probably already been moved or thrown away.
“I don’t think we’ll find anything here,” I remarked. A customary search around the room proved me right.
“I guess you’re right,” Kevin agreed. And then he switched the lights off.
“Kevin, what the hell!” Good thing I was next to him; I immediately reached out and turned the lights back on, the dark coming and going like a shadow passing through the room. I saw that my cousin already had one foot set out the door, and I guessed his plan was to have closed it on us and hold it shut for as long as possible.
“Oh, you’re no fun!” Kevin pouted. “I thought you wanted to be closer to Ah Kong and talk to his spirit.”
“I thought you said this house had no spirits. And what fun? You want to make Aaron cry and get us all in trouble?” I threw a thumb at my brother, who looked a bit disorientated but thankfully wasn’t on the verge of creating a scene yet. “You know he’s afraid of being in dark rooms. What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Don’t yell at me,” Kevin’s face darkened. “This is my house.”
“I don’t care,” I raised my voice. “You tried to lock us in, you jackass!”
“Guys, stop fighting,” Aaron’s voice was trembling dangerously, ready to break into cries any moment now.
“No, I didn’t. And you’re the jackass, Jonathan.”
“Shut the hell up, Kevin.”
“Yeah, you are a jackass,” Kevin spat angrily. “That’s why no-one likes you! No-one wants you, and even your mother doesn’t want you!”
“Oh, that’s so clever. Come on Aaron, let’s go …”
“I mean it. She called last week at that particular time because she knew she wouldn’t have to talk to you then.”
“Oh yeah, Mr. Psychic? I so believe you!” I grabbed Aaron’s hand and started to walk away.
“But she talks to Michael though. Because she likes him. Bet you didn’t know that.”
Now that got my attention. I froze in my tracks. “What are you talking about? Michael’s off on his own. He doesn’t talk to anyone.”
“Just because he doesn’t talk to you doesn’t mean he doesn’t talk to other people,” Kevin smirked arrogantly, much like how his father usually did. “We message each other. He told me.”
“Why would he message a little butterball like you?”
That got to him alright. Considering all the insults he was dishing out to me, he never could take it if I gave it back to him, especially about his weight.
“I’m not fat!” he cried. “And your Mum isn’t coming back! Not ever!”
My eyes flicked to Aaron, who was looking increasingly harrowed. His face reminded me of the time Michael had told us that Santa Claus was evil because his name was an anagram of “Satan”. That had given Aaron so many sleepless nights. And guess who had to put up with it all through no fault of his own?
“Shut up, Kevin,” I hissed. “He’s going to cry.”
Kevin wasn’t listening. “She told Michael she wasn’t coming back, I swear! Your dad is just pretending she will.”
“Is that true, Jonathan?” Aaron asked me in a high trembling voice, and his eyes began to well up.
“Uh … well …” I knew the right thing to do was to reassure my brother, but I was just as taken aback by Kevin’s words; true or not, they offered some clarity about the Mum-situation, especially compared to the six months of uncertainty I had been facing thus far.
“She’s not coming back?” Aaron pressed on. “You said she was …” He stood there, tears and snot running down his face, and long, drawn-out sobs racking his body.
I was still looking for the right words to comfort Aaron, but couldn’t find any. “Look at what you did!” I turned to Kevin instead and caught hold of his collar. “You made him cry, and now they’re going to come up and punish the both of us. Thanks to you and your … your lies!” Finally, I had managed to deny Kevin’s claims. But I was a bit too late.
“I’m not a liar! It’s not my fault!” Kevin hollered. “He’s just a cry-baby, crying all the time!” And then Kevin burst into tears as well, breaking into deafening shrieks that initially sounded like mad laughter to me.
“I didn’t make him cry! I didn’t lie!” he screamed, hopping about and slapping the wall with his palm. “It’s all your fault! Yours!”
I knew this was going to end badly for me. Three kids were in a room, and two of them were crying. Guess which one was going to get blamed?
I heard the sound of footsteps rushing up the stairs, and the next thing I knew Pa and Ah Peh had appeared at the doorway behind Kevin. My uncle knelt down beside his son immediately and began consoling him; Pa patted Aaron on the back a few times, then his hand clamped down like a vice on my shoulder, and he half-dragged half-carried me from Ah Kong’s room to Kevin’s. Inside, he threw me down onto Aaron’s unravelled mattress. It didn’t cushion my fall too much, and I landed hard on my side.
“What did you do?” Pa demanded, bearing down on me and blocking out my entire field of vision. “What did you say to your brother?”
“I didn’t do anything! Kevin made him cry.”
“You tell me now or …” He reared his hand up, fingers splayed open and quivering eagerly for a collision with my flesh.
“I told you, I didn’t start it! Kevin said that Mum was never coming back, and Aaron …”
“And you both believed him? Did I ever say she was never coming back home?” Pa demanded, breathing heavily into my face. “What were you all doing in your Ah Kong’s room in the first place? Have you no respect for your dead grandfather?”
His face was flush with raw anger, and the way he held back his lower lip with his upper one meant that he was past the point of no return. The rage had taken over, and there was nothing I could do now to stop him.
“We were just … Kevin wanted to play a dare game …”
“A dare game? You think you can fool around like this during your grandfather’s funeral?” Pa’s hand came down so quickly that I realised I had been hit only after my head had snapped all the way to my right. Everything he said after that went straight past me, like I was a shade from beyond this world, out of reach even to Kevin’s talking board.
“… So you’d better behave yourself tomorrow. Understand?” Pa was saying when I finally snapped back. I nodded blankly, still in a daze. My face felt hot, and the slap still stung. Pa rose and gave me an odd look, as though he suddenly didn’t recognise who I was. He looked at the palm he had used to slap me and, briefly, I almost thought I saw his head turn away from it, like he was flinching from his own hand. When had Pa hit me before? I couldn’t really remember … However hard he was on me, getting any sort of physical punishment from him was incredibly rare.
The moment passed, he turned and walked out, leaving me to think about how this was all my fault.
My fault.
It was always my fault.
It wasn’t Aaron’s fault for being such a cry-baby or Kevin’s for being such an asshole. No, everything was always my fault, because I was the one who didn’t point the finger first. I was the one who was the slowest to react, the last to get out of the way, the one who tried to stand and reason with a steamroller of a father.
So, of course I deserved it all, didn’t I? For being so stupid. For not being smart enough to pin the blame on someone else. I kept falling for the same trap again and again. I never, ever learnt. What an idiot I was. A hopeless weakling.
And then it came. That dreaded feeling. Whatever you do, no matter what else happens, don’t you start crying now, I told myself. I wasn’t a wuss like Kevin or a cry-baby like Aaron. I wanted to do anything I could to hold it back. Anything! I had to stop myself from crying.
I kicked my bag as hard as I could. I tore open its zip and grabbed at all my clothes and books. I threw them about, sent them flying. Who gave a shit about homework? I stamped on them, crushed them, and then flung them away. Then, I looked around for more things. Nothing left? What about Aaron’s stuff? Or Kevin’s? I had to find something!
Ah, yes, my watch. A good choice. The one Pa gave me for my birthday last year, the one that cost $100, and the one I polished and cleaned so often I could see my face on its glass cover. There it was again, my wretched, sour face looking just as miserable as it had looked in the bathroom mirror. I suddenly couldn’t stand looking at it anymore. This is what you deserve, I declared in my mind, and I tore the watch off my wrist and threw it on the ground.
“I hate you! You jackass, you never do anything right and you never will!” My foot landed solidly on the watch, shattering its glass cover into a thousand pieces. I heard the hands and the gears underneath crunching to the movement of my foot grinding into them, and I dug my heel in more, savouring the sound. When I’d had my fill, I looked down at the massacred time-piece, ready to finally feel a little better.
Instead, all I felt was deep regret. Not so much about wasting the money Pa had spent on the watch, but about destroying the watch itself. It felt as if I had just brutally murdered something that had lived, a thing that had a soul. Like I had with my own face, I couldn’t bear to even look at it now. I picked up the watch’s remains and disposed of them in my cousin’s dustbin.
The rest of my handiwork was strewn all over the floor. I got down on my knees at once and started fixing what I could, putting back my bag and clothes where they had been and straightening out the torn, crumpled up sheets. It was a good thing that I’d not started on my homework at all, for the things that had suffered the most were my blank foolscap pad and my textbook, the former still half-empty and the latter salvageable with bits of scotch tape here and there. Thankfully I hadn’t busted anything else, particularly anything else that wasn’t mine.
Done with the cleaning up, I crashed on the bed, exhausted. I ended up lying curled up on the lower bunk of the double bed, as pressed up against the wall as I could be – I wished I could stay like this for the rest of my life. Nothing mattered to me anymore. Everybody in the family was against me. Pa didn’t like me and he was certainly not going to call Mum for me. And I was never going to see or talk to her again. Besides, she didn’t want to talk to me anymore. She liked Michael and Aaron and Jen, and wanted to talk to them. She didn’t want me. I should’ve known all along.
The pillow that my head was resting on started to feel uncomfortable, and I brought a hand up to touch it. It was soaking wet. I realised that tears were streaming down my eyes and onto it in generous gushes; I had been caught totally unawares, that too by my own thoughts.
Rolling over, I went prone and buried my face into the pillow. That would muffle any sounds I might make and hopefully draw my tears out faster, getting me dry as soon as possible. And if I could be lucky for just once today, maybe it would stop me breathing entirely before the others could come back to see me for what I truly was. A coward.
Chapter Five
By the time a drained Aaron and an uneasy Kevin were led back into the room, I had picked myself up and was sitting cross-legged on my bunk, putting up my best nonchalant front and looking busy with my maths homework, the tear-stained pillow conveniently turned over and tucked beneath the duvet. There had been no need to suffocate myself after all; my brother and my cousin had taken far longer than me to recover from the fight and compose themselves.
It was bad enough that I’d resorted to doing homework as a way to get myself through the remainder of the evening. What was worse was how something that was usually painful could turn out to be a calming and relaxing experience; I was positively buzzing on long division and geometry. I reasoned that this was at least partly because I had brought along my good old G2 black pen with me. It was my lucky pen, unbeaten in the pen-flicking games I played on tabletops with my friends, and one of my best buddies for all of five years and still counting. The lovely black ink it produced was always dark and rich, because it was always just wet enough to shine, but not too wet that it smudged over the paper like most fountain pens did.
Black ink was so much stronger, so much bolder than the crappy blue Mrs. Yap preferred. School work required me to write down facts and figures that were important, and irrefutable, as the teachers said they were, and stood as articles of wisdom handed down since the dawn of civilisation from one generation to another, the kind of stuff we had to remember for life. So why wasn’t I allowed to use something that made it all look as important as it was? Blue was a weak ink. Black ink on white paper, now that looked like the perfect representation of truth absolute.
Mrs. Yap didn’t care for black ink though, and she insisted that we pupils never use it in her class. This only made me love the pen even more, and I wrote with it every chance I got – which meant I used it only occasionally, and whenever I got the impression that she’d forgotten about the last telling-off she’d given me over the pen. She rarely escalated it beyond a yelling, which I accepted as a sort-of unofficial license to use my G2 every so often. The most recent warning I’d received from her had come fairly recently. Maybe a bit too recently, and that was why I’d opted for a blue pen earlier in the day. But that was then and this was now; I was in so much crap already that I no longer cared about what that bitch would say. There was nothing she could do that would make things worse than they already were for me.
My studious turn-of-leaf served to put the adults off any sort of interaction with me for the rest of the night. When Ah Em and Ah Peh came in to brief us on the next day’s events, it was all directed at the other two. All I got was a cursory reminder to wake up on time the next morning, as well as the routine questions about if I had taken a shower and brushed my teeth. Kevin and Aaron didn’t speak to me either, but that was to be expected.
After that, the grownups went downstairs to continue with their overnight vigil over Ah Kong’s body. The girls were joining them too; they’d been recruited to handle the midnight shift. The only job left for us boys to do was to go to bed.
My roommates did that without a problem, and it left the room library-quiet, with only the gentle hum of the air conditioner playing in the background. The silence didn’t prove too helpful in letting me sleep though, and this was despite me being completely spent from all that had happened earlier and then going into a homework-doing frenzy and wiping out a good third of my maths debt. What was wrong with me? I felt so heavy lying on that bed, with barely enough energy to keep myself breathing. Why the hell couldn’t I fall asleep?
A rustling noise from above perked my ears. Seconds later, Kevin’s face appeared from over the edge of his bunk, upside-down. In the greenish glow of the nightlight, his round head looked like a big, fat gourd.
“Hey, are you awake?” he whispered.
I didn’t answer him. I simply lay there, staring straight up at Kevin’s mattress and observing how it was being squeezed tightly into the spaces between the bed’s wooden boards by his heavy flab.
“Are you still mad?” He slung himself down the bed’s stepladder, and his mattress released a squeak of relief as its springs readjusted themselves. He clearly wanted something from me, and I knew that he wouldn’t leave me alone until I responded. I wasn’t really that upset with him anyway; despite his considerable girth, there were far heavier burdens dragging me down.
I sat up and gave him a questioning nod. In return, he came over and perched on the edge of the lower bunk. Out came his right hand, and it held his brand new smartphone, its bright screen a good enough replacement for the room’s main lights. He smiled at me then started flicking through his list of contacts.
“Here, I told you I wasn’t lying,” he said, handing me the phone. It was indeed a chat thread between him and Michael. “He does message me, Jonathan.”
“‘Did you see if our dad made Jonathan cry?’ … ‘I’d have loved to have seen that, ha ha’ … ‘Did the little toad get punished?’” I read the texts out loud.
“Go back up.” A flustered Kevin stuck his finger over the screen and began scrolling up through the messages, so they went backwards in time.
“‘I don’t measure with a tape because the sides are too sharp’,” I read from the screen, and flashed Kevin a curious glance. My cousin winced.
