2003-05-12 - 5:16 p.m.

1.

He would insist that they sit on the upper deck. Up the spiral steps he would lead his mother, a hand on the railing, an eye on the front seats at the left side. His legs are not long enough to reach the floor, so they swing freely as the bus breaks a path through the languid afternoon. Images ripple across the windows, and he would read off street names audibly to himself and once in a while his mother would correct him. Tree branches would sweep across the roof like hairy wands. Sometimes he would thrill to the anticipation of nearing a low-hanging clump of leaflets and twigs, the sweet, triumphant crackle that would follow, and the bus, if it had a voice, exclaiming, ‘I am a giant’. On the roofs of bus-stops: bottles, broken umbrellas, crushed drink cans; they are wandering souls without proper graveyards. Squinting from the sun makes him sleepy, and the shoulder next to him is a good pillow. It is a pillow that smells more of his mother than of himself though, but it is a comfort during vertigos of sudden swervings and the drunken ambles of passengers.

When his mother tells him it is time to alight, he rushes up to the bell button and looks at her face for the signal. Any time now the bus would stop at his bidding, it is as good as a king genuflecting before him. But sometimes someone else beats him to it, and the contact between his finger and the bell withers, his arm sinks towards his side, and he scans woundedly at the faces in the bus for the adult passenger who has snatched his moment from him. All he sees is nonchalance, a bored smugness, it seems nobody succumbs to or even notices his vengeful stare. He is most angry at his mother, for not giving him the go-ahead earlier. As the bus folds its accordion doors with a hiss, she squeezes his hand and smiles sadly at him and tries to empathise with the gravity of his little mishap. But he is inconsolable. He sulks, pulls his hand away from her, folds his arms: there will be no next bus ride, there will not be another chance, he doesn’t care if people are looking at him, he wants to carry a silence in him until it turns into stone. But when it is time to cross the road, his hand inches up towards hers, and he waits for another signal. ‘After the white van’ she says. He looks up at her and is suddenly filled with love, for the sureness of her grip and for her eyes, fixed at where the horizon should be, so steely and vigilant they are almost tearful.

2.

It happens when someone steps on his Bata shoes. He would rub at the vulgar streak of dirt across the white canvas, he would steal a piece of chalk to camouflage it, before realising there are two possible shades of white. It happens also when he brings home a test paper two marks short of a perfect score; he has not yet known what it is to bear the weight of decisions, but he knows the full burden of bearing the weight of carelessness. All he wants to do is linger, take half-steps, extend time…he does this by walking tightrope along a kerb, or counting the number of steps to his second-story flat, which to his dismay, has not changed (there are 11, then 9). It happens also when a moment of exorbitant joy keeps his arms unchecked, and his watch is scratched against a wall. An initial wipe erases the paint, but there is a deeper scar in the glass. Another wipe, and a trick of light, or the grease of his fingertips, almost convinces him it has disappeared. He closes his eyes, and then looks at his watch again. The scratch is still there, flashing at him, stubborn, stubborn as a heartbreak.

3.

He spends half of his weekdays in school, and this somehow splits his allegiances in half. He realises it is easier to compete with his peers than his younger sister for attention. All it takes in the classroom is a raised arm, a correct answer, and he simultaneously becomes both the envy and the salvation of his classmates—or so he would like to think. It warms him too that the Malay teacher—herself childless, bespectacled and selendang-wearing, with a distinguished mole on her chin, would sometimes address him as ‘sayang’. In his exercise books, with ruler-guided margins and one-finger-spacing between the words, this same teacher has written the word, ‘baik’, or ‘good’, over and over, and this somehow remedies each time his own mother has called him ‘jahat’, or ‘bad’, even once disowning him by relating the terrible tale of having picked him up from a garbage bin (the debt we all owe our parents is doubled when we find out that they are not our real parents).

The day arrives when his loyalties between these two women will be stretched. It is simple enough for him to take sides between groups of friends: the general hierarchy states that academic rivals are one’s worst enemies, followed by girls, and then those afflicted by the sin of pride—whose new branded bag or 9-compartment pencil case are symptoms of ‘showing off’. But to choose between two mothers—one stingy with her presence, the other with her praise, is much harder.

On that day, his teacher will ask the class whether anyone has a pointer to spare, and in this case she is referring specifically to one of those pointers that can be extended telescopically from what initially looks like a pen. He has seen one at the school bookshop, and his hand shoots up, almost by instinct. He cannot let anyone else usurp his position as the favoured one, and later at home, he will argue with his mother, insisting that everyone in the class is required to buy one. His mother will not be fooled; she has emptied newly-opened tissue boxes and agonised over legitimate paintbrushes (she fears some of the bristles are made of pig hair) for his Art and Craft exigencies, but this is certainly going too far. At night, he will fret over what to tell his teacher the next day. He will toss and turn on his bed, and his dream will take the shape of a train, with its wagonloads of lies (I have the pointer, the teacher says everyone must bring one to school, my mother says we’ve lost the pointer), an orphan train that no station will receive.

4.

He brings the consent form home from school, tucked carefully into the front pocket of his schoolbag. The phrase ‘consent form’ itself has always triggered off pleasant associations in him. It is not the destination that excites him—whether the Van Kleef Aquarium, the Zoo, or the Singapore Science Centre—but the thought of actually smuggling various items along for the excursion. The night before, his mother will pack for him soft drinks, a jumbo packet of Cheezels, a few Kit Kat bars and a visor (which he will not put on, since it bears the words ‘PSA Family Day’). To this list of already-contraband items (none of them are sold at his own school canteen) he will add the following: a Game-and-Watch toy called ‘Hungry Giraffe’ and the ‘Beano’ comics which was lavished upon him during his hospital stay. He knows, though, that his things might not be able to match up to the Walkmans and Transformers the others will bring; once someone had brought a hand-held basketball game which required the manouvering of a basketball in (real) water through the squishing of plastic buttons. Time slowed down within the aqueous court, as the mini-basketball drifted like a thistle or a feather, but it stopped for those who were gazing awestruck, crowded behind the princely game-player.

When he returns from his excursion, his mother will ask him to describe the day. He will tell her: they were given worksheets (his was only half-completed), they expected someone to fall into the eco-pond but nobody did, it threatened to rain but didn’t. And what he won’t: that his greatest triumph of the day was beating someone’s score for a Donkey Kong hand-held game, a game that didn’t even belong to him but was loaned out for a few auspicious minutes on the bus ride back to school.

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