A Certain Exposure Read online

  “A masterful debut. Jolene Tan has written, in devastatingly beautiful prose, a quiet book about disquieting things. She lays bare the dark hearts of our sentimentalized HDB ‘Heartlanders’ and our vaunted government ‘scholars’ and finds: coldness, sanctimony, and corrosive attitudes the more damaging for their utter casualness. This is a passionate warning, a chronicle of tragedy foretold. How will we save our selves and our soul? Like Anthony Chen’s film Ilo Ilo, A Certain Exposure already has the feel of an essential Singapore classic.”

  —Sandi Tan, author of The Black Isle

  “An intimately layered story about twin brothers forging different paths through the intricacies and prejudices of Singapore society, but will strike a chord wherever the struggle between personal values and social pressures is experienced.”

  —Ovidia Yu, author of Aunty Lee’s Delights

  Copyright © 2014 by Jolene Tan

  Lyrics to “I Could Be Dreaming” are copyright © 1999 by Jeepster Recordings and published by Sony/ATV Music, and are used by permission only.

  Author photo copyright © 2014 by Dan Yeo for White Room Studio

  All rights reserved

  Published in Singapore by Epigram Books

  www.epigrambooks.sg

  Edited by Jason Erik Lundberg

  Cover design and layout by Lydia Wong

  National Library Board,

  Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Tan, Jolene, 1982–

  A certain exposure / Jolene Tan. –

  Singapore : Epigram Books, 2014.

  p. cm

  ISBN: 978-981-07-8828-5 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-981-07-8829-2 (ebook)

  1. Twins – Fiction.

  2. Hope – Fiction.

  3. Betrayal – Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9570.S53

  S823 -- dc23 OCN869720778

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First Edition: April 2014

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Mark and Pei Chi—the core team

  “It’s not a terrible thing—I mean, it may be terrible, but it’s not damaging, it’s not poisoning, to do without something one wants […] what’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate.”

  —Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

  “A family’s like a loaded gun: You point it in the wrong direction, Someone’s gonna get killed.”

  —Belle and Sebastian, “I Could Be Dreaming”

  “Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame.”

  —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

  MARCH 1998

  BRIAN ORGANISED FOR the body to be flown back. His parents had been stoic enough for every other administrative task, but not for this. For a while they considered having Andrew cremated in Britain, returning, like so many dregs of tea, in a pot. But Brian could not bear the idea that he might not see Andrew again—the real Andrew, not just bits and flakes produced from his oxidisation at high temperatures. So he stepped up to the job, to phone calls with Human Remains in the airline’s cargo department, to have his brother’s corpse sent home.

  Now, in the void deck, peering uncertainly, Brian wasn’t sure why it had been important. A pot of ashes might have been preferable for not pretending to any likeness. His expectation that the thing in the casket would be Andrew had ebbed away. In his mind his brother was browned, lithesome, handsome; and though there are good reasons to doubt an identical twin’s assessment on those points, everyone else, too, found the head framed in the pearly padded lining remote and undersized, the skin false, almost papery. Not for the first time, “Human Remains” struck Brian as inapt, even cruel. The human was gone.

  He moved onto a chair. These were laid out in rows, bright red plastic under the white lights that hurt his eyes. He had the uneasy and unreasonable feeling that he hadn’t looked for whatever vague duration might count as enough. His mother stood by the casket, her arms pressed tightly across her lower ribs, her face smudged with fatigue. His father a few seats away, looking at nothing in particular. Together they formed a loose-jointed triangle of mourners.

  The sketchy theory occurred to Brian that he should move to console his parents. But the Hollywood-toned images he conjured felt hollow. An arm around a shoulder? They were not a family who touched. A sympathetic phrase? They were literal, practical people, speaking where it was useful, not given to sharing emotions. And what good could such a discussion do? Grief, guilt, anger, despair, blank exhaustion, even a kind of irritableness—as seemed so often the case, it must be impossible, Brian thought, that verbalising any of the things he felt could give comfort.

  As a child, like many children, Brian had been afraid of his parents dying. This expressed itself not in subjective feelings of fear—he would not have used the word “scared”—but in a masochistic, periodically recurring obsession. Nine years old, perched on a kitchen stool, he stared at his mother as she scraped at the bottom of the rice cooker, her profile silhouetted against the bright patches of tree showing between diagonal window grilles. You’ll go, you’ll go. You’re here now, but you won’t be. You’ll go. Across the table, oblivious, Andrew hunched over a book of brain teasers. When he looked up, Brian froze, averted his eyes, began to regard his cutlery intensely and without seeing. His heart pounded. You’ll go. You’ll go. The large rice bowl chinked solidly on the table and his mother took her place at the corner.

  “Brian, dinner.”

  “Yes, Mum.”

  He would close the car door behind him and become immediately certain that his father was pulling off into a collision, a delivery van perhaps, or, swerving to avoid a jaywalker, a bus. He pulsed with momentary hatred of the hypothetical pedestrian. This was more than a decade before the Nicoll Highway collapsed. His imagination did not extend to the spontaneous crumbling of tonnes of concrete.

  In his teens he sometimes approached the ultimate taboo, allowing himself to think the word cancer, but in a disciplined, sidelong way, never front and centre. His images of that eventuality were always rigorously vague. Once his parents took a flight without the boys, a short trip to Hong Kong, and he drove himself into an ecstasy of panic until they called from Kai Tak with a reminder not to let strangers into the flat. After that he subsided into a few days of blithe ordinariness. At one point, in a darkened cinema, he even focused single-mindedly on the question of how to hold hands with Cherilyn from Bukit Panjang Girls’ School. But then he remembered, stiffening with horror at his own neglect: his parents were scheduled to be midair at that very second. They might even have sunk, glassy-eyed, half an hour earlier, beneath the foamy waters of the South China Sea.

  It was entirely superstitious. Pure childishness. Not the fears, which were reasonable, and as these things go, indeed realistic: but the dutiful, limpet-like attention to these scenarios, the ritual invocations, the sense that his anticipation was a kind of magic charm. It was always the thing taken for granted that the universe snatched away, wasn’t it? If he stayed on the ball, his visions were forbidden, by some hazy but compelling, almost mathematical, certainty from materialising. More pragmatically—a relative description—if he kept himself conscious of their mortality, he could never be reproached for undervaluing their presence when they did eventually go.

  Brian knew, quite simply, that he needed his parents; he avoided thinking about whether he liked them. There were punishments reserved for such ingratitude.

  He’d never imagined Andrew dying, of course. Andrew was a grubby, competitive presence, crowding the wo
mb, wailing snottily from fifteen minutes prior to Brian’s infancy, and then hanging about, unavoidable, for the rest of it: like a law of nature or a reflection in the mirror. When you share a bed with your older brother, and he snores, and kicks you in the shin in the middle of the night, you shove him away and think with irritation and envy of prosaic possibilities, like one day having your own room.

  Now, when it was arguably most pertinent—when Andrew had actually died—Brian was reluctant to picture his final moments. Maybe “reluctant” was the wrong word: he was simply not moved to do it. The frenetic energies invested so involuntarily and so persistently in visualising so many other fatal sequences had, here, faltered.

  The foreignness of it all was against him. He could recite easily enough the bare, infamous facts of the situation, but they were strings of words, opaque to him. Pictures Andrew had shown him of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge University were dominated by smiling undergraduates. He had at most only background glimpses of the place itself: of curt, clipped circles of grass; darkened dining halls; sandy walls of stone. English air in March, winter and its end, were theories only: neither fresh cold nor dry electric heat came within his experience. He had never seen a photograph of Andrew’s room—or had he? He had after all seen, well, that picture. But it revealed little of the room, if that was indeed where it had been taken, to say nothing of the window. Curtains (what patterns?) or blinds? What was the view—cobblestone street, closed square college courtyard, temperate tree? (Themselves all further mysteries.) And what colour were the bedsheets Andrew had looped around his neck and tied to the window handle, cutting his blood flow and killing his brain—so said the doctors—just before dawn?

  It was hopeless. Nothing could be made of the material. And if Andrew was so partially imagined in life, it seemed to Brian grotesque to fill in the blanks in death.

  This went too for the biggest blank of all. There was no suicide note. Speculation was inevitable, and repulsive. My brother killed himself because. Because of a photograph, because of a prank, because of malice, because of his nature, because of a panic, because of a misunderstanding (on his part, on everyone else’s), because of all of the above, because of none of the above. My brother killed himself because. Brian would not fill in the blank. My brother killed himself.

  JUNE 1987

  OUTSIDE, THE RAIN unrolled in fat grey sheets, palpating walls and windows with a steady thrum, punctuated with intermittent deep-chested rumbles. The storm-time air was cool: the earth’s usual cloak of humidity had lifted. The floor’s tiles were luxuriously cold against Brian’s knees and thighs and elbows and belly.

  He had begun reading out of boredom. What he had really wanted to do was look for Priya. The book she had sparkled over seemed the next best thing, like he was learning something about her, a one-way conversation at least. He slid quickly in—it was ease and brilliance. When he surfaced, just before Chapter Eleven, the sturdy fall of water had given way to the filliping rat-tat of the roof run-off and to the emergent whirr of the ceiling fan. He sat up, stretched and considered.

  He wanted to know. What would happen when they met the King? Their three-bedroom flat in this Braddell estate could not produce wonders to match these vain sorcerers and falling stars. Priya might not be there today. It would be wet. On the other hand (he stirred), the spell was already broken (he was on his feet). Something had uncoiled in his legs; his thigh and shoulder muscles were firing urgent little twitches. The air was still enticingly fresh. He had to be moving. It was an occupational hazard of being twelve years old.

  He went into his bedroom to shelve the book. Andrew was asleep, peacefully enough. There had been a lot of muttering and jerking the night before. Their cousin Mabel, whose mother was their mother’s sister, sat at their desk with the inevitable Bible, a chunky volume she toted almost everywhere. Brian found it vaguely sinister, partly because it was Mabel’s, and partly because it seemed, from the one time he had looked inside, deathly boring. The text was tiny and drab. Someone “begat” (what?) someone who lived for some implausible length of time and then “begat” someone else of someplace, bizarre names no one in real life would have. (The same could be said of his beloved fantasy novels, but those were not laid out, like a fossil record, with this tone of laboured verisimilitude.) On request Mabel showed him the bit about Noah and the ark, which he recalled from a picture book somewhere, but it was lifeless—no giraffes, no vigour in the waters.

  It made him suspicious that the writing was not just difficult but unreachably distant, relying on retelling for charm or on translation for meaning. To hear Mabel speak, it was not a book at all, as he knew them, but a decoder-passport to shadowy authorities, to peculiar (and burdensome) commitments. Like roleplay games but in earnest, or like school but weirder. This was, to him, wholly unlike real reading and its real pleasures—the pleasure of the enchanted castle which wanders fields—where the unusual or unknown pivots suddenly into total and private view. Brian’s love of stories did not survive adolescence, but at twelve they ruled him, they had set him standards, and the Holy Bible did not make the cut.

  Though they tried to be discreet, his parents, too, viewed Mabel’s Christianity with reservations. Her mother, Poh Lian, had begun to attend church after marrying a fairly nominal believer. This was the immediate source of Mabel’s affectation (as Brian’s parents saw it), and that was innocent enough, but they had misgivings about its ultimate origins. Christianity was the ang moh religion, a supercilious British import. Lim Poh Ling and Teo Kim Seng made poor cultural purists: they spoke English at home and at work, they had bent with the winds to give their sons “high class” ang moh names, and they plied the boys with ang moh books to improve their exam results. But that was practical. This was different, this ang moh God, this Jesus Christ. (The Trinity escaped them, but they saw these two as collapsible.) It was, well, it was weird.

  This was no battle of faiths. Whatever the government census claimed in its eagerness to classify, their attachment to Buddhism was so slender as to seem, if you looked from the side, to be hardly there at all. It was the very notion of devotion, of worship, of purity, of doctrine and abstract morality, that bothered them. Particularly worrying were tales, transmitted in scandalised whispers, of converted children who refused to attend funeral ceremonies on the most abstruse grounds. Superstition, they called the traditional rites for paying respect to the dead. Devil worship. “Who is this ang moh, this Jesus Christ, so important ah, more important than her Ah Kong? Her Ah Kong leh, her Ah Kong you know!” Christianity caused weird behaviour which flew in the face of both economic gain and social ease, rather like the stories they used to hear, in lower whispers still, of people who had given away all their money, and thrown aside comfortable lives in Singapore, to serve the revolution in the motherland. Christianity and Communism were body-snatchers. And so, oddly enough, Brian’s aesthetic objections and his parents’ unimaginative ones converged.

  Nevertheless, Mabel had volunteered to come each day and watch over Andrew while he sweated and moaned his way through the fever; and Brian’s parents were impressed and grateful. Mabel was not Brian’s favourite person, but if she hadn’t been there, he would probably have spent the start of the long school holidays sitting by Andrew himself, so he was grudgingly glad of her presence after all.

  “I’m going out,” he said.

  “Where?”

  Like she needed to know. “Downstairs lorh.”

  “Don’t come back late ah. And don’t mix with gangsters.”

  “Yah lah.” The enduring mystery of Mabel: how could she be in Secondary Two, only fourteen, and already talk like an auntie?

  His annoyance fell away quickly, at some point out the door, into his slippers, along the corridor and three flights down. (One up would get him to the lift for his block, but he hadn’t yet learned teenage laziness.) Priya wasn’t in Frankie Wong Books. He glanced into the bakery next door, scanned the corner coffee shop, and then made for the playgr
ound where they had last parted. He had been sitting cross-legged on one tyre swing, suspended from a pyramid of chains; she dismounting from another, dusting gold sand off her shorts and her calves in the slanting evening light. His heart fell: both tyres now hung undisturbed, gleaming wetly. No sign.

  He wandered onto the damp sand and stood for a moment. The book again, after all, or the bakery perhaps, and kueh ambon? He had half-turned to go when she called his name, and he looked again at the tiled concrete tower standing in the heart of the playground. She was peeking out from the dingy cavern within, visible only dimly through a small, diamond-shaped hole. (Later, and not very much later at that, he forgot his encounters with Priya Menon almost totally, retaining only the essentials: how she made him feel, what she came to mean. But even so, Brian felt a loss greater than simple nostalgia, as these weathered playground structures in their kingdoms of sand were replaced in almost every housing estate—grey columns, giant birds and stony dragons giving way to open metal frames and plastic squares on rubbery foam.)

  He ducked in and joined her in a half-crouch. The space was ringed round with the small diamond windows. A knife-edge of light slid in above the platform, by their heads. They smiled at each other. “I’m reading that book,” he said, to be speaking of something. “It’s good.”

  “It is, right? I’m so glad you like it. Have you got to the part where the wizard—oh, I’d better not spoil it for you.”

  “They’re going to the King next. The castle is cool. I like the doors thing, with the colours.”

  “Yes! I wish I thought of things like that. The walking and the doors and the talking fire. So many cool things together. You know, for composition, I can never think of something new, I always copy. I copied the doors, and from another series, dragons who think in rainbow patterns and you can hear them in your head.”

  Her ease, her talking, these unfolding packages of thought, amazed him. He had a year’s reprieve before the mortifying, ungovernable teenage erections; but every time she said “you”, and he watched her looking closely at him, he prickled with aliveness along his haunches and in the small of his back. He was very aware of the length and nearness of her arms, the sand giving slightly under his rubber-slippered feet, the close circling of the walls around.