Fierceland, page 14
My armpits go damp, my tongue frozen. The gallery disintegrates into smoke. I feel as if I’m on the lip of a dead volcano. She continues, unperturbed.
—But I’ve got a nice surprise for you … I want you to cut the ribbon at the school! It’s finally done. You can basically be my right-hand woman – help develop it into something that really flourishes. I couldn’t be more proud of it. Astagfirullah, it’s been so much work. It’ll be good for you, Roz: something to connect you to the community, develop some skills, get in touch with Sabah again. And, before long, you’ll have the skills to know what to do with your half. Responsibly.
A tidal anger comes rushing back to me, elemental, spiteful. I touch the murrina in my pocket and it burns my fingertips. I want to hiss like a wild fishing cat. For a moment, I don’t think I’ll be able to speak. Yet another example of a story written in advance – Harun the success, me the screw-up.
I find my tongue:
—This is illegal.
She smiles.
—It’s perfectly legal. I mean, if you want, you can get your own lawyer to look over it … But I promise, this is all in your best interest.
She knows she’s got me in check. I would never go through the madness of the courts. When I speak again, I want it to hurt, but it comes out as a jumble.
—Fuck the money. It’s blood money. Have it. Fuck your stupid school. Trying to buy your way into heaven. You think I want to be at some stupid ribbon-cutting ceremony? Leave me out of it. I’ll be at the funeral, then I’m on the first plane back to Sydney.
—You’re not doing much to convince me that you’re ready for the money.
She’s not smiling now.
—I don’t want it. I knew I shouldn’t have come back.
—I’ll let you think on it for a while. See you at the funeral, Roz. Be there on time.
Clouds hover over the ocean, truant fingerprints of a malicious god.
Will. Won’t. Will. Want. Free will in free fall.
I … I can’t deal with this. I need something to cure my wanting …
Or at very fucking least – distract me until the funeral tomorrow.
Karaoke is already in full swing, songs in Kadazan that I haven’t heard since childhood, accompanied by technicolour, pixelated music videos, and everyone is singing along in that Penampang bar oh so sweetly, it’s Borneo after all, where per capita there are more good singers than anywhere in the world – I’d bet my inheritance on that – and I’m welcomed as if I never left by people I’ve never met, visual artists, musicians, tattooists, the glamorous girl who competed in Unduk Ngadau last year, and this guy I recognise from back in the day, Eddy (or now, actually, Hot Eddy, an artist in KL), who orders food from outside, keropok and lok lok that we crunch away on as we sing and trade drink tickets for beer after beer, tall pints of Guinness and Carlsberg. Aramaitiiii! I dissolve into the songs, music-soluble. Invisible.
But not for long.
One girl in the group, Sophie, pierces me with her gaze through the dry ice and revelry. She has severe, blonde-tinted bangs and blue contact lenses like two discs of pewter in the fluro light. I remember her vaguely from high school, she was around the punk rock scene a bit, and she also came from a rich family; Hot Eddy tells me she has started a fusion cooking school. I’m trying to avoid her, disperse in particles as if sprayed from a can, but somehow I end up in between her and Eddy, sweaty, weighted to the seat.
—I’m sorry about your father, says Sophie, not sounding sorry in the slightest.
She’s got a palpable anger I can relate to, but hers is blistering and territorial, metallic. She’s on the warpath. She recites to me a list of her achievements, including what her cooking school gives back to the community, her attitude in contrast to the relaxed mood of everyone else, floating along like a tangle of kelp on a calm sea, arms around each other’s shoulders. Everything she says seems to be some type of test, as if my responses will be held against me in a court of law. When she starts interrogating me about my art practice, I seize up, stumbling over explanations of unfinished artworks that sound ham-fisted and naive. I’m more aware than ever that I have no claim to anything in this city, on this island, in this whole fucking world. I want to tip a drink on her head.
Instead, saving my arse, someone launches into a barnstorming rendition of ‘Forever Young’ by Alphaville, so I turn away from her and start rabbiting on to Hot Eddy about Borneo Futurism, an art movement I want to kick off, my tongue loose again as the synths hit and the lyrics soar. I tell Eddy about robot headhunters and cyborg pirates soaring through the galaxy, wearing infrared ikat and fibre-optic songket. I tell him about CyberPenampang and New Kuching, where the governor is an syabu-smoking AI pimp with the head of a leopard, the city disassembled and rebuilt on Mars after ecological collapse, fuelled by volcanos. I tell him about satellites launched from Lahad Datu and pontianaks riding digital dinosaurs with saddles made of dolphin skin, radioactive beds of coins from the Ming dynasty, NeoMaphilindo, a bloc of South-East Asian island states that challenges US hegemony, with a Pan-Bornean state right at its very heart.
You’re crazy, says Hot Eddy, but you should do it, start a whole new movement! I’d be part of that, for sure. One problem here is that no one wants to be the first to do something. Once someone’s broken down the barriers, then it’s on, everyone will follow, but finding a true original – that’s hard. Are you a true original? I ask him. I’d like to think so, he replies, smiling. He shows me his linocuts on his phone. Every single artwork, without fail, is of a field of butterflies. Butterflies upon butterflies, crowded on top of each other. Why do you only draw butterflies, Eddy? It’s a long story, he says, calling for more drinks. I’ve got time, I reply, running my hands through my hair. More drinks, more food, more karaoke, the CyberPenampang night is a kaleidoscope of teeth and cigarette embers, and I’m still sitting there between Hot Eddy and Sophie, and they get into an argument about me, about whether I can say I’m still Sabahan, having been away for so many years, and it’s so intense and charged, I wonder if they’re exes. They argue as if I’m not even there. Sophie starts using terms like Johnny-come-lately and cultural appropriation, qualifying them with ‘I’m not necessarily talking about you’ so many times it becomes clear that she’s definitely talking about me. Culturally appropriating herself? cuts in Hot Eddy. What are you on about? You’ve clearly had this argument a million times before, I say, I just wish you hadn’t chosen me as the battleground. At some point, someone (I swear it’s Sophie) puts on a famous song – ‘Muka Kayu Balak’ – about a cruel woman who’s the daughter of a logging baron and has a face like a log, whatever that means.
Later, Eddy fucks like he’s got something to prove to an eighteen-year-old version of himself. Urgent, but not that bad in the scheme of things. As I move on top of him, he flickers in and out of the light, and I wonder if it’s really Hot Eddy or a deepfake, a hologram. The cheap hotel room is incredibly hot. Like rods of glass held over a low flame, we entwine, wrap around each other, double helix into a new form, then the dark slices us into small discs and scatters us into sleep.
HARUN
2018
First sun, South China Sea.
I pull out my phone as the plane lowers towards KK, down towards Abah’s funeral and who knows what else.
Snap.
Lavender clouds, yellow sandbars, green islands. Fishing trawlers and police patrol boats, hunting smugglers.
Snap.
Mildewed concrete. Malls. Highways. Half-finished streets and buildings. Corrugated zinc roofs of the water village, red-streaked with rust. SimCity golf course. Hazy blue hills. The omnipresent green of oil-palm plantations.
‘Isn’t it amazing how the jungle grows in such straight lines?’ says an Australian tourist across the aisle from me.
Snap.
Next to the tourist is her daughter – small, blonde, as Aussie as Ugg boots – nibbling a perfect, tiny, triangular ham sandwich, bit by bit, like a manga rabbit. The sickly pink, white and yellow triangle of ham, cheese, butter and bread slowly disappears into her mouth. I’m filled with a sudden fury, something I haven’t felt for a long time, and I want to slap it out of her hands. Her mother catches me staring, looking confused, then scared. Embarrassed, I turn back to my phone. I’ve managed to switch to selfie mode. Then I also become terrified – the expression on my face is murderous.
I eye myself off, not used to seeing myself with black hair again. I had a last-minute haircut to get the blond out, ready for the funeral.
My phone is waiting to jump into life as soon as it gets reception, a robot songbird that chirps and trills and tweets with an agency of its own. The torrent of news, Instagram posts and emails with work dilemmas will be a welcome jet hose with which to wash away the shitty feeling that’s hunted me the whole way. The little blonde girl across the aisle reminds me of the humiliation of high school in Australia, the buzzing swarm of airhead kids who tormented me. But I’m also sensing something bad, something evil. No number of warm towels sprinkled with Eau Sauvage or overly polite attendants could ease the sense that something dangerous awaits me when I get back to KK.
The plane skims low over Tanjung Aru and the Shangri-La. I see an empty lot facing the islands. Prime real estate. I raise my phone again and zoom in. A blurry plot of sandy potential.
Snap.
I turn back from the window and I’m shocked to see a little boy sitting next to me who wasn’t there before. How have I not noticed him the whole flight? He’s wearing a songkok, tilted on his head, holding a weird object in his hands. It looks like it’s made from pieces of scrap metal. Is it a sculpture of a bird? It looks familiar. His eyes are squeezed shut, seemingly scared of the plane’s bumpy descent, reciting a prayer in Arabic that, again, I recognise but can’t place. He looks like he’s been crying. Wanting to comfort him, I pat him on the arm, but when he turns to me, my blood freezes.
I’m looking into the eyes of a twelve-year-old me.
When he sees my terror, he starts quietly laughing.
‘Welcome home,’ he says. ‘Everything has changed – everything is the same.’
Exiting the airport, my newly cut hair frizzes up immediately, drops of sweat bubbling up on my chin. My body doesn’t quite know how to react to the humidity. What it’s meant to feel. Tense? Free? Shocked? When I get in the back of the cab, I say, ‘Apa khabar, pak?’ My first mistake. Once he hears me speak Malay, the driver turns around grinning, then won’t stop talking. After such a long time not speaking Malay, I have to focus as he unleashes a river of Manglish.
‘Pandai cakap Bahasa Melayu ya? You can speak Malay, eh? Bah. Where are you from? Dari sini? Wah! Cun. Kau tinggal di America all those years? Ahhhh, patutlah! I thought you were from New York, or like, K-pop star or something like that. Ensemboi! How much you earn, ah? Must be big salary in America. Wow, pandai cakap Melayu ya? Mashallah! Okay, jom.’
I stare out the window, trying to take it all in as we zoom along the highway. KFC and digi billboards, political posters of smiling powerful men with endless titles, brand-new apartment blocks and malls, many half-empty, sporadic palm and banana trees. The old British railway line. The hills a washed-out navy blue. The motto ‘Sabah Maju Jaya’ – May Sabah Prosper – everywhere. Malaysian flags and Sabahan flags, side by side. I’ve always remembered the Sabahan flag being mostly blue, but my eye is instead drawn to the bright red in it, surprised by its presence. How could my eye forget a whole colour? But there’s one colour I could never forget. Draped, exploding, spiking, wandering, holding on, holding up, holding down, holding together, bursting with orange and purple and red flowers – green. A green that sucks you in, absorbs your light, photosynthesises you.
For years, I couldn’t visit anything even resembling a forest. Roz always wanted to go for bushwalks when we arrived in Sydney, drawn to places that resembled it, but I couldn’t think of anything worse. Once I moved to Berkeley, people would try to get me to go for acid trips in the redwood or sequoia forests. I can’t, I’d say: I’ve got work to do.
Finally, when I moved to LA and started properly going to therapy, a psych in Santa Monica told me about a new field where people use virtual reality in exposure therapy. I then had my bright idea, one that could not only help me process what I’d seen in the forest, but also make something of myself.
The cab driver, seemingly not okay with my silence, starts talking about the election results, eyes catching mine in the rear-view mirror: ‘No good for Malaysia bah, these new people are going to ruin the country. Soon the place will be run by homosexuals and the Chinese bah!’
Bah/ba: quintessential, shapeshifting North Bornean word; suffix, prefix, conjunction, yes, no, okay. Little does the bigoted uncle know that this word was probably inherited from a Chinese dialect anyway. The word sounds strange in my mouth after so many years.
‘You can’t say that things were going well, anyway, bah,’ I say tiredly, not sure why I’m even engaging but consciously making my voice deeper. ‘Same government for so long cannot be a good thing.’
He looks back in the rear-view mirror again. The corners of his lips turn downwards into a scowl. His friendly tone is replaced by an authoritarian edge: ‘You are American now. There are many things you won’t understand … You Muslim, ka?’
‘Ya.’
‘Alhamdulillah. You married already, ka?’
‘Uncle,’ I say. ‘You have maxed out the credit on this conversation.’
‘Apa itu?’
‘Don’t worry.’
His eyes darken. We say no more. Traffic is worse than ever. So many new buildings but the roads still the same. The young me sits by my side and points at things as we go past: vape stores, ikan bakar restaurants, gold sellers called ‘Money River’ or ‘City Fortune’, bundle stores full of second-hand clothes, motorbikes buzzing along like locusts, aunties Asian-squatting on their haunches, shirtless uncles smoking in second-storey windows, Protons with Qur’anic quotes stickered across the back window, shops called D’Borneo and D’Cantik and D’Rich. The young me lifts his nose and sniffs the air, so I follow. A sweet stink coming in off the ocean. Food being fried and barbecued. Clove cigarettes and cheap Era cigarettes, imported from Indonesia, which Roz used to sneak off and smoke. And something more … It’s durian season! Hm, there must be a gap in the market in LA for durian (outside of homesick Asians). If white people can relish expensive, stinky French blue cheese, then why not introduce durian to the foodies? I type it into my notes.
In my penthouse room at the Hilton, I’ve got my outfit picked out already, a silky dark-navy baju Melayu, buttoned right up. Very simple, very elegant. I wonder if there’ll be any photographers there? Surely. I secure the cuffs with silver studs. To top it off, I place a brand new black songkok delicately on my head. I haven’t worn a songkok in so long – since back in school, actually. Since the Mandys and the Troys and the ham sandwich …
Some of the edge has been sheared off, but I still have that unshakeable feeling of unease, a jumpy fight-or-flight fear. And guilt that I’m not staying with Mak. I’ve convinced her that I need my own space to spread out in and work. Sure, she’d said, and I’d searched her voice for reproach but found nothing. Then she told me the plans for our inheritance. I wonder how Roz is going to react … I wonder if she even made it.
I’m on autopilot. I suddenly realise that I’m saying ‘Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem’ again and again as I brush down the front of my baju Melayu. As I moisturise my skin, I catch the expression on my face in the mirror and again it scares me, but this time for a different reason. I look uncertain.
Sitting on the edge of the hotel bed again, holding in his hand a robot bird, is the twelve-year-old version of me. ‘Harun. Something big is coming your way. A terrifying choice.’
When I arrive at the mosque, it’s bright and unbearably hot, people moving slowly across the glittering white tiles. There’s no wind at all. I put on shades. Everything is becoming liquid: the tiles, the walls of the mosque, even the clouds in the sky look like they’re melting. It’s one of those McMosques, built with Arab money, that almost resembles a mall. Tourists are taking selfies outside; a massive funeral for my father is about to take place.
There are some newspaper photographers at the gate, as I’d expected. I bow my head and step softly but certainly, back straight, projecting grief and poise.
Snap.
I’m shocked to spot Crazy Auntie in the crowd, looking incongruous in a tudung: errant hairs, now white, flying out. I remember her always being dressed in denim. I’m actually surprised to see that she’s still alive – last I heard she was in a mental institution, properly living up to her name, slowly decaying. And completely mute, not saying a word to anyone, even her children. After everything that happened with Abah and Mak, she’s a brave woman to come here. I’d heard she wasn’t even allowed into Malaysia these days.
I look back and see Pakcik Abdul Hamid tottering in through the gates. He smiles hugely when he sees me. A toothless mouth, with just one prominent bottom tooth at the front, reddened by betel nut, skin scaly and sagging like an old biawak – monitor lizard – the great survivor of the drains and riverbanks. His eyes are milk and his cheeks sink in when he’s not smiling, and there are scabs on his forehead from pressing it to the prayer mat so much. He adjusts the worn velvet songkok perched on his head.
‘Assalamu-alaikuuuum!’ he calls out to me.
I go to him and touch my forehead to his hand.
‘Wa-alaikum salam, Pakcik! Semuanya sehat?’
‘Ya, ya. Bagus, bagus. Good, good!’
Behind Pakcik is Jibrail. His hair is salt and pepper now, but he’s still in good shape. He’s wearing dark shades, and that makes a shiver run through me. I walk up to him and also touch my forehead to his hand, and he holds on a beat too long, but we say nothing beyond basic pleasantries. I wonder if he saw Crazy Auntie going in. But where is Roz?
