The Milkman And The Leper

Granny always had advice for Aoife that she should just follow even though she wasn't old enough to understand why because she would thank Granny later for it. That's what Granny said when she wearied of Aoife's regaling her with her string of but-whys.

So when Granny told Aoife, "Don't keep going over to that Twinkie's house to play so much", and she asked why not, she wasn't surprised when she was told the same thing.

"Alamak budak, just do as you're told can or not? You know Twinkie's mother is always going out at night so it's not good for you to take up her time in the day," said Granny, in a way that said she just didn't like the idea and would later only explain why and in Malay to her Mummy so that Aoife wouldn't understand a word. Even though Aoife did understand because she would ask Mummy to translate everything afterwards.

"Okay, may I ask Twinkie to come over here and play with me?"
"Other people's children, I don't want to take care of. Already I have you."
"But I don't mind."
"I mind. You think your Mama got so much energy to take care of you two? Anyway everyday you see her in school, why not enough? Why must play here play there? Play at school sudah!"
"Can I at least talk to her on the phone?"
"Can. You pay."

Personally, Aoife thought Granny was just being unreasonable. She was the same way with the Indian milk seller who came by daily to drop off the two bottles. She never spoke to him in the same way she spoke to the Chinese woman next door. To Mrs Heng, Granny always chatted about the price of eggs and how big Mrs Heng children were getting. But Twinkie only ever got one-word answers, and so did the milkman. Then, as soon as he dropped off the milk, she would pick the bottles up with a dishcloth.

"You don't know what he touched before touching the milk!" she would snap everytime Aoife asked why she needed to do that but not with the other bottles in the kitchen, like the soy sauce one.

Granny was the same way with the old man who slept on the newspapers he collected at the void deck of her and Grandpa's flat. If Aoife waved back to him and smiled, she would instantly grab her by the hand and circle around him as if he had some contagious disease. "You don't be too friendly to him, Aoife, just do as you're told and don't talk to him."

Aoife sensed Mummy didn't agree with Granny about how she felt about Twinkie, the goats' milk man and the newspaper collector.

"Mama came from a very rich family when she was young, and they lost everything in the war. They had to sell all their jewellery just to get meat to eat," she told Aoife.
"Why couldn't they just eat vegetables and keep the gold instead?"
"That's because Peranakans must have meat all the time. The meal isn't complete without meat. Meat was more important, so they pawned everything to get money for meat."

In fact, Granny's family had lost its entire family fortune during the Japanese occupation of Singapore in World War II, along with Granny's bride price, which was supposed to get her wedded to a rich landowner's son. The marriage fell through when the patriarch discovered that Granny's family was broke. So Granny married someone who truly loved her, which was during that time unheard of, except that Granny had no choice but to marry someone for love.

Granny had been devastated.

Grandpa had loved her ever since, and believed they could be happy on his clerk's salary of $12 a week to be shared among six children and a wife. For the most part they were, said Mummy, who remembers she and her two brothers and three sisters had to keep wearing the same shoes even though they were torn, sew their own clothes and dance to records at home because going out would be too expensive.

But whenever Granny got depressed about her life, and fretted about not having money, and felt she had not married as well as some of her siblings, she would tell the story of "my cousin Ah Eng".

Aoife knew the name by now. Granny's cousin Ah Eng had been raped by Granny's uncle. Ah Eng's mother and father found out, and to cover up the incestuous scandal married her off to the first person who proposed, a leper who manned a pig farm in Sembawang, who as it turned out, was "not so bad" for Ah Eng, as Granny would say, with a snort.

"She has four children now, all grown up. Not bad, lah, for a leper," she would end the story, usually at about the same time she finished her cigarette, and stubbed it out meaningfully.
"Mama, what's a leper?"
"A leper is someone whose body is rotting, everything is falling off, it's very contagious their disease. You touch them, you also can get it, can kena leprosy. Then they lose their toes, their legs, their hands. That's why they must live very far from the rest of us! Cannot touch them!"
"Does the milkman have leprosy?"
"I don't know! You don't know! That's why I have to pick up the bottles with a cloth, bodoh! You just listen to me, next time when you're older, you'll understand why!"
"Twinkie doesn't have leprosy, can she come over and play?"
"Aoife, you want me to put chilli on your mouth? I told you already."
"Okay, sorry."

Funny, she thought, Mama never said she couldn't play with Ping even though she knew her parents were also always away. But, as getting in too much trouble was both a painful and miserable affair, she decided not to ask any more questions for one day.

Mending Lies

Winnie Teo had spent the last five years shopping for clothes she disliked. Each time she complained to her neighbour, friend and part-time seamstress Pushpa Rajasamy, she would tell of how each cheongsam had inevitably met with its disastrous end. Pushpa would tell Winnie she knew no other woman who looked as miserable when she got a chance to go shopping for new clothes.

There was the elegant maroon outfit that reached just below her knees that had suffered an untimely death from a rip all down one side. It had been afflicted, she told Pushpa, when a male customer at the Peony Pavilion — or "The PP" as she called it, according to the national style of abbreviating everything — had grabbed on to its hem and tried to shove his hand underneath her dress. She pushed, he fell, the whole thing ripped off its seam so that it was beyond repair. The next night he came back and asked for her, she had to continue serving him, her boss had commanded “without giving any more trouble”.

Another night, Winnie had become the subject of a fight between two thugs who had decided to bet on something else besides their usual soccer game: getting Winnie to remove her dress in their private dining room. Winnie pushed her way out of the room, but caused the scrawny one to misplace a kick aimed at her to the belly of his friend, and punches ensued. Winnie was, as her boss told her later, very lucky to get away with just a bruised thigh, broken jaw and only a few days in hospital. That and irremovable bloodstains all down the front of her white-and-yellow cheongsam.

Pushpa had tried to mend both dresses on those nights, just as she had tried with all the other casualties Winnie brought by.

Sometimes they survived, but mostly they did not. Pushpa always worried about her friend, and could always be counted on for the sympathetic cluck and dramatic head shake, but she knew sometimes the best balm was a lie.

“I think this one can fix, lah. I have some strong thread.”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry. Just put some Fab powder on and let it soak overnight. Wash a bit, sure come off.”
“I have some cloth that can match this material colour. Only thing it’s linen. Never mind, we try.”

Many times, it was the threadbare promise of a try that saved Winnie from her life. She knew the dresses were never going to leave Pushpa’s nearly overflowing sink cabinet, which was where she had discovered them in neatly bound stacks when she had tried to locate some dishwashing liquid. She never told Pushpa she knew where they were buried. She never opened the cabinet again.

“Ai-yooh kadevallei! Winnie ah, I tell you truthfully seriously lah, I never met a woman who get so miserable so soon after buying new clothes,” Pushpa said most recently, tying her sari around her wide waist as the typical opening to her it's-not-looking-so-good speech.

“So many times already I suggest to you to get a job with a uniform. Those you can just clock in and clock out, do your work, go home. What’s wrong with working in a factory or a small office? You are still young! Only 35 years old. Can learn new skills. I know the pay is good at this PP palace place. But money isn’t everything. Look at me, I work in the hospital, it’s not as violent. I don't suffer so much.”

This time, Winnie held up a two-week-old emerald green garment in one hand, its collar in the other — the latest victim of another night at the PP. “So how, what do you think? Can fix?”

As the brocade got stripped off by a customer whose feet Winnie refused to massage, her neck had very nearly followed. She pushed his foot away from her face when he held it up. He tried to strangle her. She choked and threw up on his dinner jacket, he slapped. But she had been lucky he let go of her neck.

“You can tell me if it’s not possible, Push,” Winnie had said hopefully.
“Next time better you don’t buy such expensive dresses lah. Wasting money only.”
“I have to look nice for the PP guests.”
“Maybe this one I can stitch some binding on first to strengthen the material.”

Winnie left to get ready to go shopping.

When Barbie Met Twink

Twink, unlike Aoife and Ping, had no problems inventing new ways for Barbies to have conversations among themselves. She instantly loved everything about the dolls: their removable shoes, their bendy knees, their plastic blonde hair neatly implanted at the scalp in miniscule bushels, their little lips, hairbrushes, handbags, and especially their very handsome Ken-doll boyfriend.

And, because Twink knew Barbies would never be part of her world, she promised herself that she would do absolutely anything to have Ping invite her back to play with them. Her own mother wouldn't mind as long as she was back in time for dinner, she knew that. After all, she worked nights and was always asleep in the day, so Twink only saw her at dinner time, when they would both sit down to eat Maggi instant noodles with luncheon meat, the only meal they shared together before her mother had to leave for work.

"But why can't you put me in night classes so I can sleep in the day time too, just like kor kor?" she asked her mother a day later, peering over her dressing table as Winnie Teo applied mascara.

"My dear Twinkie, I explained to you already: they only have night classes for people over 16, and your brother is 18 - you're too young!" She added: "Anyway, night classes are only for stupid people. You're smart. You must study hard and try never to be in a night class! Don't be like your brother. He failed his O Levels, that's why now like that."

"But you're both only awake at night, and I always have to sleep here alone," Twink protested, watching her mother tug on her turquoise-and-silver cheongsam, one of several she wore to work at the Peony Pavilion Bar And Restaurant, with side slits that reached the hip, and thinking she might be a real live Barbie, except with black hair.

"How? Mummy pretty or not?"

Twink nodded, wondering for the fourth time that day why, if her mother was as glamorous as Barbie, couldn't she also live in a mansion and have a boyfriend who looked like The Six Million Dollar Man, instead of always having to worry about living above a 24-hour coffeeshop with cockroaches who made nightly visits to the homes of people living upstairs. And, instead of pouring brandy for men at the Peony Pavilion, who always insisted on drinking bottles and bottles of Martell even though it made them turn swollen and reddish and more ugly than they were before they started drinking.

"I wish you worked in the daytime," she told her mother.
"I've told you before, this job pays me a lot because my boss thinks I'm very pretty and a lot of customers come to see me."
"I never see you."
"I know. I'm sorry. But I'm getting late for work, so I have to go."
"Ma, I wish I had a dad. Everyone else in my class has one mother and one father."
"Well, you're just going to have to get used to the fact that you're not like everyone else in your class."
"I don't like it. Can we change."
"I hope so. I'm trying."
"Can I have a Barbie doll one day?"
"We'll see."

Winnie's smile weakened just as she turned her back to Twink. "Can you help zip me up, please dear?"

I must've said something to make her sad, thought Twink guiltily.
"Ma?"
"What?"
"I won't ask for a Barbie again."
"Mummy has to go to work now."

Inside The Doll House

Ping lived in a two-storey house in Tanglin Road, three doors down from the Chinese embassy. Ping's neighbours lived in houses that had smaller houses inside them for their very large cars, and smaller houses within those houses for the drivers of those cars, who were usually from countries that Westerners called "exotic", and where the average Singaporean family went for vacations just because they could get there by bus or train, without paying a fortune in airfare.

Ping, who had no brothers or sisters, spent her afternoons attempting to rearrange Swarovski crystal miniature animals into awkward positions in their glass cabinent, wondering if her mother would one day sense something different. Other creative additions she hoped would catch her mother's eye were the Crayola strokes she had been steadily adding to her parents' numerous oil paintings of fruitbowls over the past 238 days. These art pieces had been flown in from all the countries in Europe her parents had ever visited, including one her mother bought at the Vienna airport during a three-hour stopover.

Every evening, Ping was allowed to eat dinner in front of the television, and had watched Happy Days on Malaysian television channels so often that she had even learnt the Islamic evening prayers that interrupted each episode by heart.

Her latest hobby was trying not to sleep in the same room twice, to find out how each of the 21 rooms were different. Each time her parents left on business trips, which was very often, she would move. So far, she had tried sleeping in their bedroom, her mother's shoe closet, even on the floor of the kitchen with the family's golden retriever. Just two nights ago, Ping had pretended she was on a camping trip, and zipped up in her sleeping bag to spend a night under the stars on her front lawn. The soft patch of carpet grass she had chosen to sleep on had once been a lap pool then a koi pond, before her parents finally got tired of the maids never cleaning it right and filled it up with soil to turn it into an orchid garden. Even then, Ping had gotten uncomfortable on the ground, midway through the night, and found her way into the backseat of her father's Rolls Royce, where the housekeeper found her the next morning.

By the age of seven, Ping was breakfasting on eggs benedict, lunching on sushi and dining on steak tartare. At the age most Singaporeans, including Twink and Aoife, still thought meringues might be Christmas decorations, Ping was having them for dessert.

But the one thing Ping never did was play with her 18 Barbie dolls, who lived in what looked like a smaller version of her own home, except it was pink with a yellow roof, and its entire front opened out to the side so the dolls could be moved around from room to room.

This neat feature was something Twink discovered as she excitedly released a catch at the side of the large house.

The dolls' wardrobe is bigger than even Granny's whole collection of kebayas! thought Aoife, who was getting a little worried that she might not make it to the bathroom on time should she suddenly need it, as she usually got an urge to whenever she felt she unsure of the location of the nearest toilet.

"My mother bought me the whole set for my birthday last year," said Ping, who then showed her playmates a dress she had that matched exactly that of one of her dolls. "She bought the material and had these tailored for me and my Malibu Barbie."

"I cannot believe everything is so new!" said Twink.
"Well, I hardly get any time to play with them."
"I'll play with them!" Twink squeaked, her voice beginning to sound like a real-life version of what Aoife imagined Lois Lane from her Superman comics might do when she uncovered a secret plot that made her speech bubbles suddenly contain a lot of exclamation marks.

The Guard To The Doll House

Men in uniforms always made Aoife feel as though they should know a lot, simply because she thought it would otherwise be an awful waste of so much gold embroidery and hours of ironing for just anyone.
Yet all her encounters with men in uniforms had proven otherwise. Once, she asked the uniformed gatekeeper at school if she could sit in the school canteen to wait for Granny, who had been a whole 30 minutes late to pick her up after school.
"No."
"Why?"
"Just cannot ok? Principal don't allow."
"Why?"
"Cannot means cannot lah."
"Why?"
"Just cannot."

So Aoife had waited outside, terrified of getting run over by maniac trishaw riders or surly bus drivers speeding down the narrow lane outside the school gate. By the time Granny showed up, late from her afternoon mahjong session, Aoife's legs were aching from squatting by the drain. Another time, a guard who wore a smartly pressed blue uniform with dark blue lapels and (also) gold embroidered stripes had refused to allow Aoife into a classmate's condominium unit because Aoife had forgotten the unit number.

"You no know unit number, you cannot go in," he had said, unsympathetically shaking his head and peering down his nose from under his hat.
"My friend's name is Shahirah, and she is having a birthday party by the pool," she had explained, struggling to recall the exact name of the block and her classmate's address.
"What's your I/C number?"
"I don't have an identity card yet. I have to wait until I'm 12. But I'm only seven. I'm tall for my age."
"Like dat ah? Ok. Like this I must go and call the pool guard first. You not down here resident. I must check."
"Ok."

Who gave them these uniforms so they could look so important even though they never did anything all that important, is what Aoife wanted to know, and if they couldn't help people out, why did they bother wearing them? Why did they always act as though she was planning to do something wrong? Thirty years later, Aoife would again stare into the face of that same security guard when his picture made the front page of the newspapers for his involvement in a terrorist plot to blow up the underground train system in Singapore.

So when Ping invited Aoife and Twink over after school that day, and she saw a man in a white uniform sitting at a guardhouse to a side of a very large gate, Aoife felt her pre-test pangs in her stomach and neck sweat a little; the same feeling she had got right before her first big maths exam, just a few months ago. "Are you sure she wanted me here?" she had asked Twink, who had repeatedly assured her reluctant friend she had indeed been invited to Ping's house after school so they could all play with Ping's Barbie doll house and full Barbie wardrobe complete with Malibu Barbie beach wedges.
"I don't like pink."
"Aiyah. Don't be such a spoilsport."
"I don't like Ping."
"But don't you want to see her doll house?"
"What for?"
"Stop asking dumb questions. Everybody loves Barbie," snarled Twink.

Everybody but me, thought Aoife. She never did understand the fuss about a yellow-haired doll with so few clothes, who had a boyfriend who always so many clothes he looked like Lee Majors from The Six Million Dollar Man. Or why the doll always seemed to have a crik in her neck that made her tilt her head to one side, but yet always wore a disturbing grin anyway. Or why they never had a Barbie with brown hair and eyes wearing a kebaya or a cheongsam or a sari or something (this was, after all, years before Oriental Barbie was ever conceived, of course).

"Are you hear to see Miss Ping?" he asked.
"Yes, please sir," said a suddenly polite Twink. "Could you please tell her that Lee Ting and Aoife are here?"
"Certainly. Step right in."

Ribbons of Smoke

Aoife had inherited her father's features, her mother's sense of humour, her uncle's dimples and the wholly unrelated name of the Irish tour guide her parents had on their honeymoon in Perth, Australia.

"We picked it because it sounded like a name most Chinese would be able to pronounce, but never spell right," she had explained to her seven year old who had just wondered aloud why she couldn't just have spelt her name the way it was said: Ee Fah. She also told Aoife that while she was pregnant with her daughter - she had been 24 and a buddhist before hearing the holy voice of the Lord back then - she had admired her uncle's best features and wished them on the child she was carrying.

"And that's why you have dimples, whereas your father doesn't and I don't," she said, in that end-of-story tone she always used with Aoife when she was tired of her ceaseless whys. It was the same tone she would later use whenever her daughter begged her, a decadelater, to contemplate divorce from a man whose anger manifested itself in welts from a kettle wire he habitually converted to a whip. "I am just afraid of what God will do to me. No matter what, he is still my husband. Anyway, you are who you are, I am who I am," she said, to an Aoife who had by then become inclined to believe that Buddha would have felt differently about the pain, given his preference for moderation, and whether her mother might not be wiser to consider converting back to buddhism.

Aoife wondered, in the meantime, if there was another reason for her dimples. At the edge of her grandfather's brows she noticed two pin-prick sized holes that appeared whenever he suggested they go for a walk to buy "big pink wafers for you, and a stout for me". In her mother, she had noticed these facial features had migrated to the tops of the cheekbones, right underneath those crinkles that appeared every time her mother smiled.

I think they just move down the face with each set of children, she mused, looking into a mirror as she gathered her hair into pigtails for school. I'm just lucky I was my mother's daughter, and not my own, she thought, trying to imagine how she would look if she had two deep wells at the base of her chin instead of on her cheeks, where they currently resided.

"Eeefaaah, cepat! You'll be late for school," rasped Granny, whose unique perfume of tobacco and Cussons baby powder always entered a room about two seconds before she did. Aoife thought it was the loveliest smell in the world, and had taken to placing her nose to Granny's fingers whenever she needed to feel safe. Like on days like today.

"Mamma can you please do the ribbons?" she asked, knowing that she might have to face yet another school day without the certainty of a saga seed game.

"Aiyoh, no time lah."
"Please."
"Ok."

So she exhaled through her nose, cigarette smoke curling into ribbons, and Aoife quickly tried to grab them to tie around her pigtails.

The Battle Of Saga Seeds

I never thought it would come down to matter of a few red saga seeds, thought Aoife. She held in her hand several shiny scarlet pits, absently rolling them about in the palm of her hand, thinking how something so innocent looking could be responsible for the sting in the pit of her stomach, the growing numbness in her jaw, and the lachrymose heat behind her eyes that threatened to get worse.

She would have preferred that Twink picked another kind of, well, more serious matter to make a big deal out of. More serious, that is, in Aoife's book.

It was a game they played every day, she and Twink, a ritual they developed over the three years since they started sitting side by side in class. Each would harvest the seeds from the sand in the school vegetable patch, then hurry to a stairwell near the home economics kitchen to flip seeds. The two had it down pat. With a little division of labour - Aoife hurrying off to buy a couple of 40-cent sausage buns from the tuckshop, Twink getting a headstart on finding seeds and liberating them from their dried brown pods - the game would be underway in three minutes, keep going for another 15 minutes, leaving a neat two minutes to get back to class before the bell rang.

Then she came along, with her fancy Gameboy manufactured by that funny Japanese brand Aoife never could say right (and so never said it out loud). She also had a big allowance. She got at least a full five dollars a day, and Aoife only held five dollar bills at Chinese New Year when granny slipped her her angpow; and then only until Ma came along and whisked them out of her hand for "safekeeping".

"It's for your own good, Aoife," she would say every year, without fail. "You'll only lose it if you hold on to it, or else Uncle Pi from next door might take it from you to buy himself some Guinness."

Money was magic to Aoife. She always thought it was because people didn't quite understand it that they always argued over it so much. Ma and Pa certainly never understood it, she thought. Maybe it was so magic that they were afraid it would hurt her if she wasn't careful with it. Plus granny was always so mysterious about it.

"Eeeh-fah," she would say, taking her drag from her Consulate. "Eeeh-fah, come, let mamma look at your palm. Ah see, all the tiny holes here, when you close your fingers together? Yours can let in light, I can see through them. That means surely you cannot hold on to money. You will lose money."

She never told Aoife what that would mean, this not hanging on to money. They way Granny said it, it was almost as though Aoife's inability to hold on to money was a mystical talent.

"But is that a good thing or a bad thing, Mamma?"
"You kuat belanjah," she would say, shaking her head and exhaling cigarette smoke through her nose. But Aoife only found out what that meant much later on, when she developed a fetish for designer shoes.

In the meantime, Twink seemed to be the only person in Aoife's life who didn't care about The Mystery Of Money, unless they did not have enough between them for sausage buns.

Then Ping started buying Twink all kinds of goodies with her five dollar bills. And not just sausage buns either.
At first it was those Roundtree blackcurrant sweets, which costs a dollar a pack. Twink had secretly passed a piece to Aoife before English spelling, which they both always aced. Aoife had wondered where she got a whole tube full, but when she had later asked Twink, she had merely said her friend had given it to her. Then it was an entire stash of Haw flakes, which Twink was more reluctant to share. Then once, Aoife spotted two one dollar bills in the magnetic compartment of Twink's Xiao Tian Tian pencilbox, where Twink kept her daily 50 cent allowance. Twink had hastily shut the compartment as soon as she spotted Aoife glancing at it, blushing and mumbling something about how her mother had wanted her to pick up potatoes from the void-deck shop after school.

Then Twink started making excuses for skipping saga seed sessions, leaving Aoife to wonder what was keeping her friend away.

It didn't take long for Aoife to spot Twink and that horrid apple-cheeked Ping sitting in the tuckshop each with a bowl of 50 cent noodles - something Aoife and Twink only did on Fridays because that's how long it took them to save up for the soupy snack topped with their favourite deep friend lard garnish.

That was Monday.