I hobble towards the shed, careful not to trip over any unseen objects or make a sound. The door is unlocked. I pull it open, adjusting my vision to the wan light provided by the lamp on the floor. The old woman is squatting just inside, her silhouette shaky on the wall of the shed, her body bent over something. I sidle up to her, and peep over her hunched shoulders.
Lying on the ground before us is a young boy, unmoving, his body enshrouded in a coarse blanket, revealing only his bloated face. And cutting across his closed left eye: a deep, red scar.
6
AI LING
The pallid sun peeks out from behind a bank of grey clouds as a trio of sea birds glides across the sky. The waves lap onto the beach, leaving behind broken pieces of bleached wood, dead dull-scaled fishes and tangled coils of seaweed, occasionally touching the woman’s feet, leaving behind fizzing trails of bubbles.
The solitary seagull, glancing at the body, and then at a distant point in the sea, flies down from the branch of the coconut tree and lands a stone’s throw away from the woman. It ambles towards her, hesitant, as if wary of startling her.
The woman is wearing a white T-shirt, smeared with dirt and grease and in shreds around the neckline and sleeves, and a pair of lavender-coloured shorts that hug her hips snugly. Specks of grimy sand pepper the woman’s arms and legs; her exposed skin has turned darker. The seagull appraises the woman for some time before it ventures closer. It pokes its beak at her shoulder a few times and pulls back, waiting for the woman to move. Then it jabs her neck, harder this time, as if wanting to stir the woman out of her stasis. A tiny hermit crab skitters out of the shadow of the woman’s neck, its claws extended and snapping, and scrambles towards a nearby hole in the sand. It moves quickly, hardly leaving any mark. The seagull watches its movements for a moment, and then, in a swift motion, picks up the crab, crunches it down and swallows in a gulp.
Emboldened by the quick meal, the seagull lowers its beak to the woman’s face, its dark outline reflected in the dull surface of her right eye. It pokes at the eye, assessing its jelly-like texture. The half-shut eyelid reveals a brown-tinted iris. The seagull regards it for a second, and then in a sudden move, it strikes in sharp, precise thrusts until the eye pops out, restrained only by the optic nerve. Thick dark blood dribbles out of the socket and down the woman’s cheek. The seagull bends and holds the eyeball with the tip of its beak, giving it one last tug, freeing it. The eye catches the sunlight and seems to be taking in the seamless, thriving sea.
In the next moment, the seagull jerks back its head and consumes the lifeless object.
Her eyes were what Wei Xiang had loved most about Ai Ling, what most attracted him when they first met during a school reunion. They were attending the twentieth anniversary of their secondary school in Ang Mo Kio; Wei Xiang was three years older than Ai Ling, and although they had been in the same uniformed group in school, the National Police Cadet Corps, they had not known each other then—Ai Ling, being in lower secondary, attended the morning session while Wei Xiang came to school in the afternoon. The uniformed group was the largest activity club in the school, with hundreds of members, and had different activities for different secondary levels.
At the reunion, Ai Ling bumped into Wei Xiang as she was leaving the buffet table, almost spilling her plate of fried egg noodles and chicken curry on him.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so careless sometimes,” Ai Ling said. Wei Xiang stood a head taller than her, and his hair was neatly trimmed. She smiled up at him.
“No, no, it’s me,” he said. “I kind of surprised you there. It’s my fault, really.”
“It’s okay, no harm done,” Ai Ling said, suddenly feeling self-conscious. Her green-and-black geometric-print dress felt too tight on her hips. She should have worn a different ensemble, perhaps the blouse and skirt she had bought last month; she knew she would have looked better in it. She tried to smooth out the creases in the dress with her free hand.
They introduced themselves and traded abbreviated stories of their school days: graduation years, mutual friends and acquaintances, teachers they remembered, extra-curricular activities. That was when they discovered they had both been in NPCC, and puzzled over why they had not met before.
“I wasn’t really the most popular guy in school, maybe that’s why,” Wei Xiang said.
“Maybe,” Ai Ling said. “Although it’s not as if I was the most attentive person in school either. I was very blur and clueless then.”
They laughed, and Wei Xiang took a step forward.
“You have very nice eyes,” he said, holding his smile. “Your irises are light brown, very unusual.”
“Yup, I know. My parents’ eyes are black, so I don’t know where I got mine.” Ai Ling looked down at her black pumps, embarrassed by the attention that Wei Xiang was giving her. A salvo of noises erupted from the stage, where the emcee was adjusting the microphone on its stand, testing the volume. After clearing his throat, the emcee asked the guests to take their seats, so that they could commence the line-up of performances.
“Where are you seated?” Wei Xiang asked. Ai Ling gestured to a table with a nod of her head, where her old classmates were sitting and chatting animatedly among themselves.
“Can I join you?”
“Sure, of course,” Ai Ling said, and they walked to the table.
Ai Ling wanted to take the courtship with Wei Xiang as slowly as she could; her previous relationship had been a shaky, tumultuous part of her life that she wished to erase. Ian, her ex-boyfriend, was also someone she had known back in secondary school, and they dated during their last year in school through their junior college days; for a while, they seemed destined for marriage. At least, it was what Ian had planned, after he settled down with a full-time job in a bank, after serving his two and a half years of National Service in the army. Ai Ling, on the other hand, was not so certain about their future. Part of her doubt had risen while Ian was still in NS and after she had just started her course of study at the National University of Singapore; there, she made new friends and was exposed to different kinds of lives that were more interesting and nuanced than she had known before. With Ian, Ai Ling felt constrained by the ever-narrowing possibility of her choices, as if she were slowly working her way into tight corners and dead-ends. She was fearful of how her life could be neatly parcelled into fixed pigeonholes that would define it: career, marriage, children. Yes, these were things that would matter to her in the long run, but she was only twenty-one then and had not yet seen the world, and she did not want to settle just yet.
Perhaps, in an unconscious reaction to her gradual drifting away, Ian began to hold on tighter to their relationship, to demand more time, effort and commitment. He wanted to spend every available second together when he booked out of camp on weekends, just them without their friends, as well as to have shared hobbies and activities, like badminton and swimming. For a while, to compensate for her waning interest—she did not dare admit to herself how she felt—Ai Ling often put in more effort to be more involved, to pay more attention to what Ian wanted. She gave in to him time and again, until her own wants and desires nearly disappeared.