1. Art and Diseño

Moth
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STORIES
LEONORA LIOW
Moth Stories
© Leonora Liow, 2015
ISBN: 978-981-09-3758-4
Published under the imprint Ethos Books
by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd
28 Sin Ming Lane #06-131
Singapore 573972
www.ethosbooks.com.sg
www.facebook.com/ethosbooks
Moth
The publisher reserves all rights to this title.
Cover Design by Gabriele Wilson
Cover Photograph by Ralph Gibson
Design and layout by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd
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National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Liow, Leonora.
Moth stories / Leonora Liow. – Singapore : Ethos Books, [2015]
pages cm
ISBN : 978-981-09-3758-4 (paperback)
I. Title.
PR9570.S53
S823 -- dc23
OCN899201689
STORIES
For Ju Seng
and
For Xiang and Mei
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Contents
Falling Water...........................................9
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Blink......................................................25
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2 Jigsaw....................................................45
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Man Country.................................75
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Clara.....................................................93
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Cufflinks.............................................127
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Moth....................................................153
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Tell Me.................................................171
A Modern Girl’s Quandary...................191
Majulah Singapura..............................237
About the Author................................299
About the Imprint...............................300
Falling Water
W
hen they told me I could visit I almost spat at them.
Now we sit across from each other, like any other
couple married too long to make conversation. Who would
have thought one year could bring so much change.
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uwe are relatives at a home, I am sure you feel it too,
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I no longer wonder what you think of as you lie and
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stare at the ceiling or the underside of a bunk. I am too busy
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now with the day-to-day. My show carries on, you see, having
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an audience, even if neither is home. Even if they are, we
are lodgers sharing accommodation, wordless and detached
from one another’s doings. I make a meal—rice, a soup. I
pile my plate, go to my room. The rest is left to congeal in
case someone gets hungry. If we are to talk about progress
you might say we have made some: our son sometimes helps
himself. This I know from the diminished remains. I look
for forgiveness in such an act. I have not yet earned the right
to ask our daughter to eat. Sometimes a wild hope springs:
the possibility that we might be seated at the same time to a
meal, even if like strangers at a food court randomly huddled
at the last available table. I have not yet made the great leap
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of inserting a conversation in that vision. That requires too
much faith.
* * *
But I choose to think that progress is being made. Day
before yesterday when I tidied up the bathroom, I just went
about it, thinking no more than “people are so messy”. I did
not feel the pent-up rage that would get me by the throat
at such a time in my old life, or wish the things no mother
could wish on her children. I didn’t even feel sick at the
thought that this much vomit can only be possible from
drugs or drink in the amount that gets people into serious
trouble.
When we sit across from each other I want to tell you all
these things. I want to ask you, do you think about what’s
happening at home? The last visit I wanted to say, to that high
blank wall of your face, you don’t have to receive a visitor
just because everyone else does. But I know that even getting
this message to you is trying to shout across continents. So
we sit there, you looking at some point over my shoulder, I
looking at other families. Does it occur to you that families
visit: that your friend, the one with the scar over one eye,
the one who nods at me now, his children come with their
husbands and wives; that the other one, the friendly-looking
one with a beard, has a niece who comes with her children?
Families. Does it give you a pang that your son and daughter
do not come, that your wife and you sit in quiet desperation
for visit’s end? It’s now the 15th week. Yes, I counted. That too
I have to figure out. Why I count.
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It was Ah Lui’s daughter’s wedding last week. When Ah Lui
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asked me, I don’t know who was more shocked: Ah Lui, at
Sam is now at a supermarket. I know this because he
gets into a uniform that has “Economart” on the breast
pocket. Sometimes I see coupons scattered on his bedroom
floor. I want to ask him, did they give you these or did you
take them? Naturally I don’t. If he does not come home
looking like a thundercloud, it’s a good day. It’s like this too
with Sing. She has tattoos now all over her back. She has
bags under her eyes the size of gunny sacks. When I wake
up to go to the toilet and smell cigarette smoke and see the
rim of light under her door, I know it’s one of those nights
again. I lie still as a corpse willing that she stays home until
dawn. Some mornings she will get up and put on her school
uniform. I am careful not to allow tears to fall on such days.
I have not broken my vow to never ask, what about those
days when you disappear for days on end. Her principal
called me in last week. The fact that she even calls me in is a
concession to the fact that we once shared the same vocation.
The common language we had is now alien and menacing.
Nancy, if this carries on, you understand—she was kind enough
not to finish the sentence. I want to cry but hold it all in.
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It seems such a small thing to do, for all the things I
could not.
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my acceptance, or me, hearing myself say Of course, I’d love
to be there, congratulations! Poor Ah Lui, as soon as the words
left her mouth, I could hear her breath suspend, hear her
desperation. Thank you Ah Lui but I have another dinner that
night. Yes, that would have been the right answer in return
for such an unspeakably kind and generous gesture from
an utterly decent and duty-bound relative. What battles it
must have cost her. (How can you cut her off just because her
husband’s in jail? I can hear her say.) But I could not help
myself.
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I had such a good time. I made sure to put on my best
dress—the designer dress I splurged a half-month’s bonus on,
you remember, the purple one with the white ribbon at the
collar—and got my hair done. I put on the two gold bangles
I wore for our wedding. And I put $100 in a red packet for
Ah Lui’s girl. When the couple went around the tables for
the wedding toasts and the men gamely set aside their F&N
orange for brandy, something inside me said, At last! I said,
give me some too, no, no, more! protesting the timid drops. I
could almost hear the space opening up around me in that
split-second of silence. Here she is finally at her final disgrace.
But that was not the best part.
and from me, to receive their awkward greetings as thoughts
skittered after one another in their eyes. How do you handle
it? Why did she turn up? Ah Lui is an idiot. Do you commiserate
with her? Ask after the children? But how can you ask, they are
a mess.
accountability.
in making people feel awkward and uncomfortable. Oh you
don’t know, Huat Seng, how much older I have grown. I feel
ready for my coffin. But this is not about me.
You would have been proud of me. I did not wait. I
jumped right in with a bright chatter I didn’t even know I
possessed. I remembered whose children were away, whose
were how old, whose had given them grandchildren. You
used to criticise me for the way I kept old paper bags,
smoothing out their creases so thoroughly, hoarding so
unnecessarily, leftover gift wrap paper, ribbons. Like paper
bags, information too is subject to need and recall. In the face
of so much chirpiness, sympathy would have been an insult.
You could almost smell the relief at their having been saved
the uncomfortable guilt-cum-obligation to put poor Nancy at
ease. Nancy was clearly on her way, they could tell each other.
Strong woman, to go from school vice-principal to grocery
store cashier.
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Ah Lui had said, Bring the children. This is the best part: I
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didn’t even bother mentioning it to them.
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something was on, with me coming home one day, my white
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hair restored to youthful black, washing and pressing a dress op
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no one remembers, neither of them asked me anything.wAnd
* * *
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I got happier as the day of the wedding dinner
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I think I must be getting perverse as I grow older, delighting
I would be free for one night. Free of R
my life. Free of
Perhaps this is why people get high on drugs. Not just
the desire to be freed of shackles, but also from the desire
to be truthful, and daring others to be truthful. There is
something liberating in refusing to participate in the careful
show we call civilised behaviour. Why pretend? We scrutinise
each other from the time our first consciousness forms. And
for you and me, judgement was passed even before the verdict
was read. The wedding dinner just confirmed this. I saw their
confusion and it made me glad, to see their eyes darting to
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* * *
Yesterday when I tidied Sing’s room and emptied her ashtray,
I counted 35 stubs. On a usual morning there’s rarely less
than 30. And I found a used condom in Sam’s jeans pocket.
I am beyond wanting to guess what happened, and no longer
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feel the urge to sit one or the other down. There is only one
thing I wish for, and that is that you are in my place, seeing,
living, breathing every day all these things, which carry
on with a force and life of their own. Needing no external
agency.
But truly I need to know: how did you manage that
quantum leap from respectable wage-earner, husband, father,
to an accused charged with sex with a minor? Can a man’s
nature alter so suddenly or was there something deep down
always there, burning in secret like peat fire?
* * *
We have never spoken about it, have we? Not from the time
they came for your things, through the time they came for
you, through those days when your photo appeared in the
papers for so many mornings in a row I stopped counting.
I am sorry I could not play the dutiful wife ready for the
world’s pity or approbation. We both know my appearance
would have been the ultimate lie, worse than the lie that was
passed off as your life. Our life.
So you see what I am getting at: that was a long journey,
Huat Seng. A very long road to travel to arrive at a tawdry
hotel room with a child. There, I have said the word. Child. I
don’t care what goes on in the internet about her, I care that
it was you. I care that there were signs along the way: steep
cliff, rocks, sharp bend ahead. I care that you saw them, even
though you will hate me for this statement.
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this path because I need to place myself
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at did I miss my signs, our signs? There surely
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an explanation, even if as banal as, There are no such
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That evil just happens, as lightly and randomly
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And now that we sit across each other, gutted and
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as rocks will tumble down a hillside, a poisonous creature
mute, I have this crazy fancy that you hear my question inon
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sink its sting.
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the silence, and secretly laugh at the ridiculous simplicity of
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Or can evil lurk, peaceable and expectant beneath the
it. What made you do it? The question that is a windblown, o
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stolid surface of a stolid marriage?
spindly thing built on ashen remains, a hut in a clearingwatop
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a village piled on bones. The question that is just
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* * *
of asking, What did you not see in your life,
When did the way you see things change?
Pursuing it will take me right back to the path we
took together, make me comb it to see where the sign was
missed, the wrong turning overlooked. Do you remember
that holiday we took, when we had to drive through all that
countryside? Watch for signs, you kept saying. There were cliffs
everywhere. I have to drive, you just watch for signs. And there
were so many of them with little images of slopes and small
stones falling off cliffs.
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Childhood sweethearts. How did you feel reading that
description of us? In print, laid bare, our life was desecrated.
After that, and many pills later I got calmer and then I
realised: I was also a part of the desecration. By my omissions,
Huat Seng. I simply could not see: and then, I would not see.
And I got my punishment. It was not even all those
columns and reams devoted to your hearing that was the
worst of it.
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