Landon emerges from the house and the young man pricks up, looking past Cheok to get a better view of him.
“Morning,” he greets with a nod.
Landon finds in him a likeness to a dark-haired Tin-Tin. “Can I help?”
The young man flashes his ID and offers a hand through the gate. “I’m Julian, Police Intelligence Department.”
Landon holds his breath. It has got to be about the bombing and the stranger named John must have had something to do with it. This fellow might be a colleague, perhaps assigned the task of gathering eyewitnesses, testimonies, those sort of things.
The officer named Julian articulates a name in a Mandarin dialect followed by an IC number, which Landon affirms as his own. “Says here you’re Chinese.” Julian consults a document. “You don’t look Chinese.”
Landon feigns a laugh. “I get that a lot. I think I’m part Malay, part Chinese and a dash of Dutch. The ancestor-thing, you know,” he lies. “Never could tell when everything’s blended so well.”
Julian isn’t amused. His eyes flit over to the pink, blistery bulges on Landon’s forearm. “Looks like trauma,” he points to them with his pen. “An accident?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember. What’s this about?”
“We think you might be implicated in a recent incident, and we’re hoping you could help us with the investigation.”
“I’d be glad to.”
“Good.” Julian’s unflinching gaze unsettles Landon. “Where were you yesterday morning between seven and nine?”
“Home.” Landon keeps a straight face. “I went to Café Kinos at about ten.”
“Got an alibi?”
“I’ve been living alone since my mother’s passing years ago.” Here Landon frowns a little. “Am I suspected of something?”
“My apologies.” Julian appears all but apologetic. “Just the usual background checks. You got ID?”
“It’s inside. I’ll go get it.”
Landon returns to the house. Cheok, besom in hand and looking rather awkward in their presence, grins at Julian and gets a twitch of the lips in return. Julian resumes his inspection of the grand old house, observing its grey stucco walls blackened with fungi at its base, its shuttered windows painted many times over and the untrimmed bougainvillea creeping all over its chicken-wire fence. He scribbles something in his notepad. The patches of perspiration on his thin chest and underarms expand in the blustering morning heat.
Five minutes later Landon jogs down the driveway and reveals the fluster in his face. “Couldn’t find it…” he pants. “Must’ve misplaced it. You have my IC number, I’m sure you’ll know if it checks out.”
Julian doesn’t blink. “Unfortunate. You said you live alone?”
“Yes.”
“No extended family?”
“I have a very small family. I’m afraid they’ve passed on.” Landon creases the corners of his lips in an attempt to smile. “Would you mind telling me if there’s something wrong? I was at the café when the bomb went off,” he blurts a little too hastily.
Julian looks puzzled. “A live birth was registered in your name.”
The response almost jolts Landon out of his skin. He locks his jaw and with difficulty, works his expression into one of incredulity. “Live birth? When?”
“The hospital found out yesterday evening, when the serial number on the live birth notification failed to match up against the hospital’s birth register. Besides, the “mother” turned out to be someone who had reported a stolen IC a week ago.”
Landon’s heart rises in joy. He can fit something in. “I remember now.” A smile breaks genuinely across his face. “I also lost my IC about two days back.”
Julian folds his arms. “So you have.”
“I’m sorry. My memory—it’s medical.” Landon scratches his temple. “I’ve got therapy sessions with my doctor twice a week and I’ve been taking medication. It’s the kind that makes you forget the recent stuff. But there’s a bit of both… It’s really bad, you see, even the memories of my past are hazy. My doctor could tell you more.”
“Unfortunate.” Julian makes a note of it on his book. “You should’ve lodged a police report the minute it happened.”
Landon hunches fawningly. “Sincere apologies, sir. I’ll report it immediately.”
“At the nearest police post please, if you don’t already know.”
“I’m so sorry. It’s my first time.”
Julian shuts his notebook and slips his pen in the breast pocket of his damp shirt. “That will be all for now, Mr Lock. Thank you for your time.”
“Not at all. I’m sorry for the misunderstanding.”
“Have a good day.” Julian lifts a hand and walks away.
Landon watches him drive off in a maroon sedan and suddenly remembers that his damn IC is in the folder with the birth certificate, which by now would’ve been annulled.
Cheok comes up to him. “Something wrong?”
Landon doesn’t answer. His amnesia has got him temporarily off the hook, and only by the skin of his teeth has he managed to evade arrest. He has messed up, no doubt, and the dread of it pervades his heart like a drop of black ink. He tells himself it doesn’t matter because at worse they’d cut him open.
And the thought terrifies him.
3
LOEWEN LODGE
THE ROUTE FROM Clacton to FourBees is a long but scenic one; unending rows of hedges, raintrees, angsanas, rowhouses, bungalows, the Geylang River after Mountbatten, then comes the Stadium Dome from across the Merdeka Bridge.
Landon rests his head against the window and ignores the greasy patches left there by the passengers before him. The bus cruises along Orchard Boulevard and passes the spot where the explosion occurred. He catches sight of nothing but a wall of blue tarpaulin tessellated with police insignias.
He alights at the stop after the Botanic Gardens and saunters two hundred yards along a lonely trail flanked by walls of untended hedges. Beyond them lies a decrepit mansion called the Woodneuk House, inhabited only by thrill-seekers and sex-starved druggies. A path off the sidewalk leads into the northern tip of Dempsey Hill. An old tarmac road leads farther south towards a fork, where one road turns into Harding and another to Loewen.
Along the way to work he passes a handsome colonial bungalow of bright whitewashed walls and black-framed windows, which sits on a patch of manicured lawn. A sign set in large black Garamond typeface against a white wall reads, “Loewen Lodge Nursing Home”, and under it, smaller italics proclaim, Where living truly begins.
We’re being nursed in the years after our birth and the years leading to our deaths. Nursing homes are really hospices to those who die a little more slowly. It would be wonderful if only babies needed nursing homes. I’ve waited, but Death never came. To get tired of living is an unpardonable sin. But it happens.
It is the blight of man: to get tired of everything, even himself.
He hears singing—more like throaty voices chanting to a song which ends in a clatter of erratic clapping. It is midday and the air is sultry. Amid the rhythmic shrilling of cicadas, six old men and women play woodball on the far side of the lawn.
On the nearer side a scraggy old man, placid and vegetative as the trees around him, sits unmoving in a wheelchair. His lower lip, glistening with drool, droops and exposes diseased gums. His freckled cheeks hang like jowls. A blue handkerchief is tucked into the front of his rumpled shirt. Landon has seen him many times before at the same spot and in the same posture. But this time it is his caregiver that seizes his attention.