Frog Under A Coconut Shell Page 15

  I knocked and knocked but the wood of the door was so thick that nobody heard me. The door of our own house was only a plank-thick and even a small fist like mine could make an impact. Then I noticed a button by the door and pressed that and I nearly jumped when I heard the sound it made right through the house. An electric doorbell! I was impressed. You can’t have electirc doorbells when you don’t have electricity. A woman dressed in a crisp, white samfoo and black trousers opened the door and she looked at me, standing there on the doorstep wearing my Chinese New Year dress with the can-can underneath, with a basket in my hand.

  “Hello, Aunty. Elizabeth invited me,” I said in English.

  Without saying a word to me, she turned her head to face into the house and yelled, “Lizzabet! Lizzabet! Your friend is here.” I thought she was Elizabeth’s mother, so I handed her the basket with the cake. She looked at it with a wrinkling of her nose, closed the front door and then walked away with it in an ambling gait. I quickly took off my shoes and lay them neatly, then stood in the cavernous room in total amazement that a room could be so huge. The floor was in colourful mosaic, smooth and level, unlike our undulating cement floor with the vestigial urinal for the cows. There was even a staircase! I have never seen a house with a staircase before and I was staring up at it when Elizabeth glided down the stairs, like a queen, in a pretty but simple, store-bought dress. She looked at me standing there in my Chinese New Year dress with the can-can underneath and she said, “You look different without your school uniform.”

  “I brought something for you. I gave it to your mother.”

  “That’s my amah, silly,” she said.

  I had heard of people having servants but this was the first time I had met one. She showed me into the hall cum living room and to me, the room was enormous, bigger than our whole attap hut. I was stunned. Then I saw it, the baby grand piano whose surface was so shiny that it showed my surprised face. The price of the piano would probably feed my family for a year, if not longer. And what would the lessons cost?

  “Can you play that?” I asked, with incredulity in my voice.

  “Of course, what.” She said with the confidence of the rich. “Want to hear me play?”

  I nodded and sat watching with admiration as her hands moved like magic across the keys. To me, it seemed incredible that an innate object like the piano could be persuaded by clever fingers to exude such heavenly music. I had never seen a real piano being played before, never heard such glorious music live. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. It was then that I remembered my mother telling me about her playing the piano. What a loss it must be for her not to be able to run her fingers along its keys. I recalled her description of Grandfather’s bungalow by the sea and I imagined her sitting on the piano stool as Elizabeth was sitting, her slender fingers making the keys ripple, her back straight as the sea-breeze lifted her beautiful black hair. So this was what it was like to be rich, you did not have to worry about anything but the making of lovely music.

  I didn’t want her to stop but she did, to show me around her house which seemed a trillion times larger than our attap hut. All the furniture and ornaments were so expensive looking! We walked through so many rooms and we were still downstairs. In the end, I couldn’t keep from asking, “May I climb the staircase?”

  Elizabeth looked oddly at me and said, “Okay, lah.”

  She led the way. For me, each step upward was an exciting journey. My hand caressed the polished wood of the bannister. When I reached the top landing, my triumph was equal to that of a mountaineer who had scaled the peak of some famous mountain. The summit of bedrooms and bathroom was a virgin landscape to me. I stood and surveyed this new land of personal bedrooms and personal wardrobes and personal space. Elizabeth and her younger brother had a bedroom each, whilst her parents shared one! I could not believe the luxury of it. In our home, my father slept in one bed with my two elder brothers. Where his bed ended, my mother’s began and she slept in it with my two sisters and myself. When Robert arrived, I moved out onto a fold-up canvas bed with Matthew. When I had my period and became self-conscious of being so close to Matthew’s body, I chose to sleep on an old mattress on the floor where the rats scuttled around at night. Until today, I can remember the squeaking of the mice and rats as they emerged from the drains to burrow through the holes in the ground into our houses. Though it was hot and humid, I would tuck my blanket carefully and tightly around my feet, all round my body and over my shoulders. Sometimes a curious mouse or worse, a rat, might sit on the edge of my pillow to peer with curiosity into my face, its eyes gleaming in the dark. I’d be so terrified, I would have no voice to scream.

  “Aren’t you afraid of being alone in such a big room?” I asked.

  “What’s there to be afraid of?” she asked in the voice of a child so used to being secure, to owning things.

  “Where’s your mother?” I asked.

  “Oh, she’s probably playing mahjong. My amah takes care of me all day.”

  She showed me her beautiful toys, the kind that you get from the real Robinson’s, the kind that Santa Claus handed out; everything was store-bought and properly made, not like my homemade rag dolls and doll-houses made from shoe boxes. Here at last was the Rich Kid I had been dreaming of, who might need a companion! I hoped that Elizabeth would ask me back again. Downstairs, there was a room totally dedicated to dining, with an enormous rosewood table with mother-of-pearl inlay and matching chairs. At our home, our family sat on the kitchen floor for our meals; when we had visitors, they sat on empty orange crates. We were too small to reach the table, so the amah piled cushions on the chairs for us to sit on. Then the amah brought out plates and plates of food. It was a feast fit for an emperor.

  ”Who else is coming?”

  “I hope you like the food.”

  Like? I hadn’t had meat for a week at least and there was all that wonderful chicken and beef laid out in front of me — I thought I had landed in heaven. There was a dish of fried chicken, black bean shredded beef, chilli king prawns, steamed fish and wholesome vegetables, none of the type discarded by the vegetable sellers to be used as pig’s swill. And as much boiled rice as I wanted. The rice was a full-grain variety, not the broken rice that we normally ate, which families like Elizabeth’s would feed to their chickens. It tasted wonderful. My friend acted very nonchalant and played with her food, hardly eating, confident that there will be another meal if she wanted. I daren’t let the opportunity pass. I was vaguely aware that she was eyeing me, probably with regret for asking me but I could not resist stuffing as much food as I could into my mouth and belly. When you wake up in the morning and are not sure if you are going to be fed, you eat when there’s food. Today, when people tell me they are on a diet or when they say they’re too busy working to have time to eat, I know they have not been really hungry. True hunger is not from choice. True hunger is a stone mill grinding away in your stomach, but with nothing to grind but acid. You hold your tummy and double-up with the agony, your face is pinched, the tears crouching behind your lids ready to fall. When we were lucky, we had a whole fish to share with the whole family, some over-ripe vegetables which Mak skillfully disguised with spices or curry powder. Sometimes, Ah Cob and Romia would bring in the eels they catch, they would steal the leaves from someone’s ubi kayu plant for vegetables or Mak would cook an unripe papaya. On bad days, we ate our boiled rice with a sprinkling of soya sauce and nothing else. Elizabeth would not have survived.

  My brother Matthew, just a few years older than I, was a survivor in the wilderness of our deprivation. He had a small build with a head that reminded me of an elf’s. It was he who taught me how to fish for eels so that we could take them home for Mak to curry. He showed me how to look for warm eggs, when ducks and chickens had strayed from their coops. And it was he who taught me how to scour the rubbish bins for half-eaten sweets, apples or blackened bananas.

  “Don’t ever plunge your arm into the bin,” he warned me when I was fi
ve. “There might be broken glass inside. Slowly remove each layer of rubbish and work your way through.”

  The rubbish bins of the rich, like those of the English people at the top of the hill in their mock Tudor houses, were treasure coves. I was too small to look into the bins without standing on my toes. Matthew taught me how to hold my breath, how to swat the flies and ignore the cockcroaches as we rummaged our way through the things discarded by the rich. What things we would find, torn comics and picture books and broken toys! What did it matter that a doll had only one arm or that a fire engine had no wheels? They were toys we would never dream of having in a hundred years. Matthew and my second elder brother, Romia, were good with their hands and could repair almost anything. So a doll with an empty eye socket might be filled with a coloured marble, a toy-puppy with a leg missing might be invested with a piece of wood.

  There is a day I can never forget. A day that will rush back to me in my nightmares. And sometimes in my waking moments. The memory of that day came flooding back to me once when I was walking up the hill in Guildford, Surrey (comfortable Surrey, people call it). I suffered such a panic, that the sweat ran down my back and I trembled from head to foot. I had to tell myself that I did have money in my wallet, that I could actually walk into any restaurant there and pay for a meal of my choice. When you’ve been hungry for a long time, the fear still crouches in the corner of your mind, waiting, waiting. The day which keeps coming back to haunt me was the day Matthew took me up to the top of the hill where the English people lived in their white-walled houses with fake black beams.

  “The rambutans will be out,” Matthew said. “The branches will be drooping over the fences with the weight of the fruits. All we have to do is pluck them.”

  Amongst all the things that he had taught me, Matthew taught me how to steal fruits from people’s gardens. But hunger had no conscience. So I was willing to be led. Besides, we were only kids. It was not an easy climb for my short legs up the hill to where the big houses were. To our dismay, all that remained were fruits which were still green. The gardener must have picked the ripe fruits that morning. I was particularly hungry and ready to cry. The rubbish bins, too, looked clean as though they had just been washed, so there was nothing to pick. Just as we were about to turn away, a servant came out of the house into the garden with an enormous piece of steak in her hand. Pets were to us a phenomenon of the wealthy. After all, who could afford food to feed to pets when human beings were going hungry?

  “Loger! Loger!” The amah in her white samfoo and black trousers shouted for the family pet in Cantonese-accented English. The huge Alsatian dog bounded from the back garden and the amah threw the steak on the ground. There was only a chain-linked fence between us and the dog — and the steak.

  “Oh, look at that piece of meat!” Matthew said. “It could feed our family for a week.”

  “Mak could curry it,” I said, drooling.

  The servant turned on her heels and disappeared back into the kitchen. The dog eyed the piece of meat critically. The dog might be fussy but we weren’t. I imagined what Mak could make with that piece of meat, marinating it with spices and stir-frying it. The juices ran in my mouth as I saw myself biting into that piece of lovely meat.

  “I could put my hand through the fence and grab it from the dog,” I said.

  I looked at Matthew. He didn’t say anything but I knew he wanted me to. His arm was much larger than mine, so I knew he could not do it.

  “Be careful,” he whispered.

  I knelt on the ground near the fence, balled my hand into a fist so that I could put it through the chain-link. The Alsatian suddenly looked our way and saw us. He must have smelled what we were up to because he looked at us suspiciously. As my hand inched its way towards the piece of meat, the dog sprang up towards it. His barking was so loud that I shook with fear. I was so terrified, I forgot to curl my hand and it got stuck. The Alsatian was coming fast towards the fence.

  “Quick! Quick! Make your hand into a fist,” Matthew said trying to pull my arm.

  The dog snarled and bared its rows of teeth. Just as he reached us, I balled up my hand and drew it through the chain-link. Matthew was pulling me so hard that we both fell backwards to the ground. The dog’s nose came through the fence but thank goodness nothing else. His head loomed large, his eyes like fire, his bark loud. His jaw was open, his tongue hanging out with saliva dripping from it. For a moment, I saw my hand ripped and bloody between his teeth. I started to tremble and Matthew dragged me up and we scampered hastily down the hill.

  Once I made the mistake of confiding this incident and my recurring fear to my stepdaughter Sadie. I entertained false hopes that by being friendly and spending some time with her, sharing confidences would bring us closer. Even though she was already in her 30s, Sadie still harped on the fact that her parents had neglected her on exeat weekends when she was in an expensive public boarding school in the West Country. She was brought up in a mansion in Buckinghamshire and never really had to work for a living, giving up a job as soon as she found it tiresome. After all, her material needs were supplied by a doting father and then by a husband. Her idea of deprivation is that she and her family didn’t have more than three holidays a year.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem now, right?” She said, drily. “You’ve got my father.”

  Old fears are hard to loosen from one’s psyche. They cling to you like your own shadow. For that reason, I am afraid to stop working, reluctant to be financially dependent on someone else. But how can someone like Sadie understand? She has everything money could buy. She has never known a single day of hunger and has made herself rotund by her love of food but not exercise, so that even designer clothes could not disguise it. Even when I had provided the best sleeping arrangement for her sons that I could manage that Easter, she had complained. Apparently, she did not think it was adequate that her young son should sleep on garden cushions on the carpeted floor of a plush suite just for a short visit. I wanted to tell her how I slept, for years, on someone’s discarded mattress on the cement floor with rats running around. But I didn’t. I don’t know what triggers off the memory of the day the Alsatian bared his teeth to me. But it came as I sat at Elizabeth’s beautiful dining table with all the wonderful food spread out before me. The utter fear of being hungry again gripped my insides. I felt lucky being able to feast as I was feasting in this house, on food which I had only dreamt about. I was only sad that I could not pack the huge leftovers for my brothers and sisters, particularly for Matthew and Mak. Elizabeth was pure Chinese, so she ate her rice daintily with chopsticks. Although Peranakans eat noodles using chopsticks, we eat rice using our fingers. I scooped the food out of the dishes with a spoon but used my fingers to eat. Customs differ in different cultures, even those that are within the same country. So it must have seemed really strange to Elizabeth to see me eating with my fingers, gobbling and gobbling down all the food. As she watched, her eyes grew larger and larger. I was not too surprised when she never asked me again. I must have seemed to her like a pig at a trough.

  Ten

  I know now that my mother often sacrificed her share of food for us when we were children. I was so greedy and so ready to take it from her that I never stopped to think that she might be hungry too. Aren’t children thoughtless? My memory of the past comes sliding back into the present like films on rerun. I don’t know why this is so. Perhaps it’s because I have the capacity to think more deeply now then when I was a child. Somehow, my subconscious must have stored the impressions and the images from those times and replay them to me now as my mind focuses on that particular period. I can recall (can it be recollection when I wasn’t aware then?) seeing my mother push her plate aside when she saw we didn’t have enough to eat. If my father should remark upon it, she would say that she was not hungry. She would fill her stomach with bulk food, like rice or noodles to spare us the fish or the meat. She was truly the epitome of the perfect mother. I regret that she was everything I was
not, so selfless in giving to her children. Those opportunities I could have had to prove myself such a mother were not mine to have because I chose to run away from the father of my children. It’s the little things I have lost, a child’s first words, his face when he opens his birthday present, me reaching out to clean ice cream off his cheek, feeling his breath on my skin, hear him call me Mummy. Little things which would have plugged up the hole of my emptiness.

  But this is my mother’s story. I remembered her giving her food to me, so when I started working, I tried to redress the situation by buying her her favourite food. I would never go out and return home without something for her to eat. It might be a packet of hokkien mee or satay or something really small, like a steamed pau or siew mai. But it would always something that she liked or had expressed a nafsu or desire for. I would go out of my way to a hawker centre which was famed for that particular food so that she got the best. I had the privilege of money and transport and the ability to read signs, so no distance in Singapore was too much trouble to take something home for her to eat. It is the one thing she remembers to this day. That is why when she’s caught in her state of confusion, she always says to Bernadette that it is only I who feeds her. This is not so, but she remembers it like that because I was unfailing in my daily ritual until I left the village to get married. But Matthew, Agatha and Bernadette are the ones buying her the food now that I am so far away. Once she fed us, but it is our turn now to feed her. And it’s not just food.

  If I could, I would also take her out further afield to places which sold the special foods that she loved. Since I am back home again in Singapore, I suggest an outing to a wet market in Geylang Serai and then to a hawker centre near Haig Road, so that she can eat her favourite nasi bryani. Because the hawkers are no longer itinerant and no longer hawk their wares, hawker centres are now called food centres, though I am too entrenched in old terminology to change. Bernadette had generously put her car at my disposal so that I can take our mother there.