“My name is Origen and I am a friend of your father’s,” said the strange man in all his vocal richness. “You will go back to sleep and you will heal.”
Origen hovered something over Aldred’s eyes. It was an egg-shaped device with a surface so reflective that Aldred saw in it a contorted image of his brokenness. A beam of red light filled his sight, and he fell back into slumber.
43
REBIRTH
OVER THE LAST four days a spell of influenza has confined Aldred Lock to his bed and reminded him of his newly-acquired vulnerability to everything human. The old house at Clacton has been sold for a handsome profit. After deducting part of it for the purchase of new accommodation and adjusting for inflation, the money will last him a while. Aldred doesn’t swim so he figured he doesn’t need a condo.
At present the windows are wide open. Muslin curtains sway to a breeze. The morning is bright, but not yet scorching. A light haze lingers and masks a sleepy skyline in the distance. Aldred rests his hands on the aluminium sill and watches the world from his twenty-ninth storey apartment just off Dawson Road. He is looking at traces of the old estate where an elderly Sikh once peddled milk with his scraggy cows. There’s the Princess House that has been preserved. There’s the spot where Hannah’s flat once existed.
On a low antique shelf a turntable sings. Aldred’s finger taps to the melody and his lips move to the lyrics:
He now knows why Hannah loved this song. In it there is optimism. It’s good to have optimism. Perhaps it’s the only thing that’s truly free, that you can have as much of as you want without having to worry about consequences. At most you’d die an optimist. It beats dying a neurotic.
The catch? You need faith for optimism to work.
Aldred moves away from the window and takes up his journal. He riffles through the empty pages after his last entry. They’ll have to remain empty because there really aren’t many things to write about now. For a long time his pen hovers over a page. He hasn’t got the best memory in the world but at least a grocery list is now enough to get him through the days without a hitch.
At last he begins to write, with slow, careful strokes of the pen:
The expectation of death sets in us a vulnerability that humbles. And with it comes wisdom. It obliges one to plan, to make arrangements, to be responsible. It drives the urge to set things right, to correct one’s mistakes before the appointed hour, and to love before we can no longer love.
My name is Aldred and the Count ends here.
Dempsey Hill is as quaint and tranquil as Aldred had left it. He observes the FourBees site from afar. A perimeter of bland hoarding encloses it like the hermetic walls of a forbidden city, revealing not a sliver of its mysteries and secrets. They are but a concluded chapter of a past that is best forgotten. It won’t do him any good to pry.
Haltingly he plods on towards Loewen Lodge, fearing that someone might recognise him. Upon arrival he is relieved that the matron who threw him out during his last visit is away, and no one else seems to be paying him any attention. The lady at the reception is rummaging through something under the counter when Aldred taps the bell.
Her head pops up and Aldred notices her name-tag.
“Pam, right?” He directs both fingers at her and tries to sound friendly.
A slight frown of annoyance. “Yes, sir?”
“The sustenance allowance for the patient in 8-C?” He draws circles with his finger over the countertop. “I called earlier.”
“Ah yes,” Pam rises to her feet and starts flipping a ring folder. “It’s a transfer from a previous donor, yes?”
“Exactly.”
She pulls out a document. “It’s been arranged. You’re Mr Landon Lock?”
Aldred hands her an old IC that bears his previous name. Pam takes it, references it against something and then returns it to him. Everything checks out fine. Hannah had apparently planned it to the detail.
“Did you know the previous donor?” says Aldred.
“The young lady?” Pam is bending over the desk and scribbling something.
“I heard she was his wife.”
“It’s written in the records, sir. We don’t usually look into such matters. Some donors prefer to remain anonymous and we respect that.”
“Ah.” Aldred looks away and drums his fingers restlessly on the counter. After all that had happened, the mystery remains.
“Did you bring the cheque, sir?”
Aldred slides it to her and she passes him a document along with a pen. He sees the old man’s name and IC number printed on one of the sheets. It is a name in a Mandarin dialect, and one which he does not recognise. He signs the document.
Pam gives him a receipt, some pamphlets and thanks him for the donation with a standard, service-quality smile.
“Can I see him?” asks Aldred.
“Perhaps in half an hour?” Pam suggests. “They’re all out for their afternoon walks, sir.”
Aldred glances over his shoulder. “Could I go see where he lives… sleeps…?”
Pam accedes and leads him past a games room and a diner of multi-coloured tables and peonies before they reach a corridor flanked by rooms of six beds each. Above each bed a ceiling fans spins soundlessly. They enter and Pam directs Aldred to a bed near the window. A tag at the foot of the bed reads “8-C”.
The bed is made, and beside it Aldred finds a nightstand in faux ashwood laminate which contains the resident’s possessions. In a drawer he finds bottles of ointment and packs of unopened catheters and syringes. One compartment holds adult diapers, the one below it carries a heap of old magazines and a rumpled telephone directory from the year 2002. And underneath them all Aldred discovers a rusted tin that still bears traces of the brand of biscuits it once contained.
He lifts its lid to a heap of worthless trinkets—little stringed plastic beads, a brown rubber ball cracked with age, a peeling wooden top and a crinkly cellophane bag containing a few old coins. Deeper into the strata he uncovers a stack of magazine clippings, a faux jade necklace, a few old 70s sticker pads. And in the final stratum—a monochrome photograph of himself seated in an eatery with a young boy perched on his lap. The young boy’s head is thrown pompously upwards, and there is a playful, magnanimous smile on his face.
Life deals its blows. Serendipitous or not, it’s often hard to tell.
The full measure of the recollection hits home like the passing of a heavy, judicial sentence. He runs along the corridor, photograph in hand, his footfalls shattering the calm, his eyes burning; and under the disapproving glares of the attendants he bursts out of the lodge.
On the right he sees a kindergarten down Harding Road, and on the left the road leads off to the hospital block of the former Tanglin Barracks. A football pitch stands in place of the former cricket lawn where he had seen the dead over a century ago. Farther away the road forks and bends uphill along a wooded grove. And there a wheelchair-bound contingent descends in a single file.
He sees him—the old man, four chairs from the front, his head at an angle, his hands upturned like Madonna herself in the likes of Michelangelo’s Pietà, carrying the dead Christ—a Madonna battered by age and whose saliva freely flows from a hanging lip.