Written in Black Read online

  WRITTEN IN BLACK

  KH Lim

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DISCLAIMER

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  In memory of the real Ah Kongs

  Chapter One

  It was a Tuesday morning when I got the call from my uncle, catching me at the very moment I was about to decide which of my two blue pens I was going to resign myself to using over my favoured black one. There was work to be done, and a certain way I had to do it, and I’d already wasted much of the afternoon with my face buried in my tattered six-year-old copy of Huckleberry Finn.

  Ah Peh sounded like he had a bad cold as he asked where my father was. I told him what I knew, which was that I didn’t know where my father was or when he would be back home. My uncle then grumbled about Pa always leaving his mobile phone switched off. I interrupted to ask if it was anything urgent before he could say his curt goodbye and hang up on me.

  “Urgent? Boy, your Ah Kong won’t be there anymore when your father arrives.”

  “Oh, so you finally managed to get him moved to a better place?”

  “Jonathan, don’t …”

  “Down to the warmer rooms? You know, with his cough …”

  “Jonathan, stop! Listen to me. Your Ah Kong is gone. Do you understand? He’s gone.”

  “Ah.” I was too surprised to say anything else, and remained holding the phone to my ear long after my uncle had hung up. When the disconnect tone turned into a deafeningly shrill squeal in my right ear, I was finally snapped out of it. I knew my grandfather had been admitted at the hospital two days ago for a bad chest, but Pa had never let on how poorly Ah Kong had been doing. He’d even kept us kids from going over to visit him, telling us to concentrate on more pressing matters, like our upcoming tests and assignment deadlines.

  And now Ah Kong was well and truly gone, for good. Yet, somehow, the only thing I could think about at that moment was how our family gatherings would be a lot less troublesome from now on. I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about getting badgered into massaging his dusty old feet, with their hard, crooked, yellow nails and flaking bits of skin. Or lighting him cigarettes behind my parents’ backs. Or getting dragged along to visit his grizzled coffee-stall buddies, who loved to ask me weird questions about which side of my family I preferred or how many houses my mother’s family owned or which of my mother’s cousins had been out of work the longest.

  When Pa eventually returned home, it was in one hell of a huff: sweaty, red-faced, his clothes dishevelled and Mum’s ill-fitting sunglasses slipping off the near-non-existent bridge of his nose. The sight of my father in such a state felt far more disconcerting than finding out my grandfather had just died; I’d rarely seen him as flustered as he was now when he shambled up the stairs and into the open area, where I was sitting on the sofa finishing off Huckleberry Finn whilst picking out with my free hand the yellowing sponge of the sofa’s innards through its rips.

  Bound by our respective rooms and the staircase entry, the open area could barely accommodate two cupboards – which were stuffed with old novels, magazines and souvenirs from my parents’ past, like their various sports-and dance trophies and their trinkets from their travels in Europe – a couple of creaky sofas and uncushioned rattan armchairs, and a fusty old TV with its screen made of hard glass and with only the lower half of what remained of its adjustable antenna.

  There was nothing from Pa as he brushed past all this (including my ten-year-old self, since I probably counted as one of the fixtures to him for all intents and purposes) then slammed the door of his room shut behind him. I felt the reverberations rattle the dingy old couch I was lounging on, and flakes of paint fell onto the floor since the slam had loosened some of the cracks running along the ceiling above me, its original alabaster surface now soured into a musty yellow. I noticed that Pa hadn’t closed his door properly; the bolt had fallen off the strike plate of the frame with a piercing clap of metal-on-metal, causing it to drift ever so slightly ajar.

  My father’s voice soon rumbled from inside his room. He was on the phone with someone. Was he talking to Mum? I left the sofa and crept up to his door in about three seconds. I waited there, holding my breath, listening to him speak.

  He was indeed on the phone with my mother. Having a conversation that would end up lasting the grand total of a minute. I strained my ear, but couldn’t really make out much of it from outside the room. Not that it mattered anyway; I already knew she wouldn’t be coming home for the funeral.

  Why couldn’t Pa have given me the phone, even for a few measly moments? Mum had been gone six months and I’d not heard her voice since the day she had left. And it wasn’t like everyone else had been missing out; whenever she had called this house, Pa had managed to hog the vast majority of her calls, and I’d missed out on the rest due to some horrendous twists of fate, like the time she had called while I was out on a class trip, or that evening I had got locked outside the house and the doorbell had stopped working too.

  I was badly due a chance to speak to Mum. Pa owed it to me. It was getting to the point where every time I heard any phone ring, the first thought that would pop into my head was, “Is it her? It just might be her this time.”

  My father was now mumbling to himself angrily. Pa always got angrier when he called Mum, and this time was no exception; he had practically slammed the phone back in its place when the call had ended. I listened in on my father’s mutterings, hoping to catch any information I could from it; I thought I heard him say “Dubai”, but I wasn’t sure if I had heard right. Was Mum going to Dubai? It couldn’t be.

  I peeped into the room through the crack left open by the door, and I saw him, shoulders heaving visibly, reach back for the phone and dial again. He was slumped on the edge of his queen-sized double bed, his feet resting on the lower shelf of the mantelpiece that held the telephone and a directory. The rest of the room was bare and without furniture, save for the small TV set that was placed in one corner. It was the biggest room in our house, but it looked more like a spare one that no-one used, and the closest thing in it that came to a decoration of some sort was the swirly design of the iron grilles that barred the exterior of each window.

  Ultimately, I decided to slip in, already sure that he was going to scold me for it. I hadn’t asked his permission to enter, but I had to find out what had gone on between him and Mum.“Your Ah Kong is gone,” he said simply, putting the phone down. His tone was surprisingly even.

  “I know. Ah Peh called and told me. Is Mum coming home for the funeral?”

  Pa’s face had the same look it had from the time I had asked him about the meaning of the word “copulation” (thanks to some brilliant advice from my oh-so trustworthy friends).

  “No. And your brother isn’t answering his phone.”

  “You actually called him?”

  Pa had kicked Michael out of the house two and a half months ago, after my brother, hard-pressed to scrounge up sufficient cash for a used motorcycle on a cut-price offer, decided to be very enterprising with a few of Pa’s prized possessions. It was something that we’d all seen coming for a while. My sixteen-year-old brother had a history of acting up, but after Mum had left, he went totally out of control. I’d not seen or spoken to Michae
l since, and as far as I knew, nobody knew where he was; not even Pa. But I didn’t worry so much about him. He was a dumbass, and his only purpose in life seemed to be making life difficult for everyone else in the house. Besides, it seemed like he was probably tough enough to last out there on his own, like a cockroach surviving a nuclear blast. A giant, six-foot-tall, annoying cockroach. I was sure he was happier wherever he was.

  “Start packing,” Pa said. “I’m going to pick up Jen and Aaron now. Then, we’re leaving for your Ah Peh’s house.”

  “Today? But what about school?”

  “I’ve called the school. You’re all going to be away for two days.”

  “Oh.” I couldn’t resist myself. I had to ask him about Mum. “Did I hear something about Mum going to Dubai?”

  “What did you hear?” His tone was still steady, but his eyes were growing darker, and his slightly protuberant jaw, which had been inherited by all his offspring, was suddenly clenched and trembled visibly. “You were eavesdropping on me, weren’t you? I thought I’ve told you many times not to do that.”

  “I was just … I wanted to find out about Mum. Maybe speak to her a bit …”

  “Well, you can forget about that for a while. She is going to Dubai tomorrow. And she says she won’t be able to call us from there.”

  “How long will she be there?”

  “I don’t know for how long. As long as the doctors say she needs. Why don’t you send her an e-mail and ask her yourself?”

  Mum being unwell was the lie Pa told everyone, and it was also the reason Mum herself had given us for leaving home. They had both given us the excuse of an unspecified malady that could only be treated across the seas and down under. I knew this wasn’t the truth though. Mum had been the healthiest person in all Brunei, or at least our household, and I’d never seen her ill before. Not one sniffle or cough, even when the rest of us were hacking and snorting and flinging our snot everywhere. However, I also knew that, especially around the time of her leaving home, the healthiest person I had ever known, and the person least likely to ever need the services of a doctor in Brunei, let alone one overseas, had been the unhappiest as well.

  We kids usually e-mailed her a few times a week, but so far, we’d only received a handful of replies from Mum. The most recent one was a five-line paragraph she had sent us a month ago, addressed to Jen and talking about the Australian weather and about a wonderful dim sum place she had found in Melbourne.

  “I … Maybe we could call her one more time then. Before she leaves.”

  “Stop nagging me, Jonathan! And we have no time to do that. We’ve got to leave for your Ah Kong’s funeral soon. Let her call us when she wants to.”

  Pa pursed his lips to show he was done talking about this. He handed me a plastic bag full of clothes, then followed through with a set of instructions about the funeral gear he’d rented from the temple on the way home. Uncomplainingly, I took the bag back to my room and laid out its contents on my bed: three sets of dark blue shirts and equally dark blue trousers that would serve as mourning outfits for me and Jen and Aaron, in good old traditional Bruneian-Chinese fashion.

  I shared the room with Aaron, our two single beds occupying the opposite sides of the small rectangular space that also managed to fit in a cupboard packed to the brim with our books (mostly mine), a wardrobe, two working desks and a dressing table next to each of our beds. It was the second-largest room on the upper floor after Pa’s, and was connected to a common bathroom that opened on the other side into our sister Jen’s room. And like Pa’s, it was also pretty bereft of colour or decorations. Well, there was stuff on the walls, but I’d hardly have considered the posters displaying nauseating platitudes – “Never put off tomorrow what can be done today” or “Time and tide waits for no man” – that my father had us endure as the sort of things a normal kid my age would want in his room. Jeez, those slogans were tiresome even for Aaron.

  I dumped all our funeral clothes into my tattered rucksack, which, with its three broken zips and a coin-sized hole at the bottom, was always threatening to give way any minute. Then I moved on to pack myself the other essentials I needed for Ah Kong’s funeral. So naturally, in went a couple of choice comics. I knew very well that any family gathering that was not a kid’s birthday tended to be mind-numbingly boring, and this one would probably take the cake in that respect. I would surely need something to read while I was there.

  The comics were followed by my bathroom stuff, and then my homework. Thanks to a little bout of diarrhoea, I had missed school the past couple of days, and yet, somehow, everything Class 5D, my class, had been working on in my absence was turning up at my desk, awaiting completion. I picked up the sheets with a groan and stuffed them into my bag. I had two whole practice papers for maths class, and no answers. The only consolation was that Taskmaster Mrs. Yap, our maths teacher, wouldn’t be around to see me use my little calculator to help even the odds a bit in my favour.

  If there was ever a time when I really needed Mum, it was now. Maths was beginning to get a bit tricky for me, and she was a maths teacher after all. The not-yet-awful but still-noticeable drop in my grades in the recent months was hardly surprising. She wasn’t there to teach me at home like she used to. And now she was going to be out of reach for what might as well be forever. It certainly felt that way to me. Maybe if I tried harder, I could persuade Pa into making that one last phone call before she left for Dubai, and before she became more unreachable. I assumed she’d be keen to know how I was getting along and would be happy I had called. Besides, I had so many things to ask her.

  Like what Australia was like, and if the people there were all as good looking as they looked on those travel brochures. And if she’d seen a kangaroo yet, and if the steak there really was ten times better than anything we had here, like Ah Peh claimed it was. What places she’d visited, and how our Aunt May and her family was doing. And what toys she’d got us …

  And why she had really left. Would she ever come back?

  Had life here with us been truly that terrible? It could’ve been with Pa, but were the rest of us not enough to keep her from leaving? Or was it because of all of us?

  Or because of me?

  Chapter Two

  By the time my father had returned home with Aaron and Jen, I was done packing and was watching TV. We didn’t have cable, so I was making do with what was on the terrestrial channels, flipping between an episode of a New Zealand gardening show, which looked suspiciously like something I’d seen last year, and a documentary on camels, or “the ships of the desert” as the show’s host liked to call them.

  “Aaron,” I called out as soon as I heard my eight-year-old brother stomping up the stairs.

  “Hey. What’s on?” He flopped down onto the chair next to mine, just in time for the afternoon news bulletin. He was still dressed in the white short-sleeved shirt and blue shorts combination that was the standard uniform for most schools in Brunei, including ours. As ever, the pinned-on school badge above his breast pocket was slanted at a distracting, almost 45-degree angle; I had never asked him about it, but I suspected that he was doing it deliberately because he liked the attention it got him from people.

  “… Cases of shoplifting have risen by 50%, police figures have revealed …”

  Aaron stared at the TV, transfixed by the newsreader’s strikingly long, pale and ghostlike face, and the pointed ears that stuck out of his head like little horns. We never could remember his real name, so we called him Daryl, because it kind of sounded like “devil”.

  “Pa told you, right?” I asked, trying hard to peel my eyes off the TV screen. Had the devil-newsreader grown a tiny beard too? Those ears were really looking awfully horn-like all of a sudden.

  “… as well as congregating in places of ill-repute, such as pool parlours and karaoke lounges …”

  “Aaron!”

  “Huh?”

  “Ah Kong. He died. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah. Pa to
ld me already.”

  I shook my head at my brother’s cluelessness. He was still staring at Daryl instead of concentrating on the important event going on in our lives.

  Aaron and I looked a lot like our father, right from our crew-cut hairstyles and deep-seated eyes and large upturned noses, to our lanky frames and flat-footedness. A frequent joke between the two of us brothers was to propose swapping our larger, wider eyes with our sister’s considerably narrow pair, if she’d be willing to trade her ideal thin nose with our fatter ones. A fair trade-off indeed if it were possible, we thought, but Jen never quite saw it our way.

  In spite of these differences amongst us, the three of us still shared most of our features with our father’s side of the family. Only Michael took after Mum’s in a significant way. He had a sharper, much more angular face as well as a considerably lower forehead, and his lower jaw stuck out the least amongst us. The resemblance to Mum’s side was made complete by his droopy eyes and his considerable height, which was probably the only area in which my eldest brother had ever managed to reach his full potential. Pa was a bit taller than the average Bruneian but Mum was as tall as him, and even then she was by far the shortest in her family.

  “… finding alternative activities for youths to spend time doing, such as playing traditional games like congkak and gasing, participating in walkathons, attending civic lessons …”

  “Aaron, he’s dead. He’s gone. We’re not going to see him ever again. Don’t you get it?”

  “Yes, we will,” Aaron snapped, and turned away from the TV to look at me, frowning. Ah, the spell had been broken finally. “We’ll see him again in heaven. With all the angels and Kevin’s cat, Meemo.”

  “Cats don’t go to heaven, Aaron.”

  “Yes, they do. The cat angels let them in through the flap on the pearly gate.”

  “What are you …? Never mind.” I had wasted enough time already. I needed to let him in on what I knew about Mum. Maybe he’d be of some use in helping change Pa’s mind. Maybe Aaron could convince him to try calling our mother once again.