Story for performance #447
webcast from Singapore at 07:06PM, 10 Sep 06

There are too many accidents, the aunt in the suburbs says. Too much noise. The satellite city groans day and night in its shackle of traffic and housing estate babble, its roadworks and waterworks, its roaming hawkers and tradesmen. Not to mention the squatter women and youth running wild.

The aunt’s house is attached on one side to a ladder of terrace houses running up a slope. On the other side is a main road, buffered by a straggle of garden in between. The aunt feels the weight of all those houses and people pushing down towards her. She turns her chair so her broad back faces them, and squares her hips, and plants her feet.

At night her walls seem paper thin. When the local pictures are over at midnight, bikers on their souped-up vespas festooned with flapping rubber eagles race past, in squadrons, like mosquitoes. ‘It makes one shudder,’ the aunt laments, ‘even while asleep.’ Their sounds sting her dreams. She turns over in bed, muttering bad tomorrows and universal affliction, burrowing further into her pillow while Min lies on her side in her nearby campbed like a cat, her eyes wide open, as instructed. ‘Watch carefully!’ the aunt orders. ‘Don’t dare fall asleep!’ The streetlamp through the louvred windows cuts the aunt into neat slices. The slow-moving fan overhead bastes her in shadow then deeper-shadow, shadow then deeper-shadow.

Quite often the bikers fall over, skidding their skins over patchy macadam or into the monsoon drains, or even into the aunt’s garden, one level lower than the road. Falling bikers knock her mango trees crooked, smash her best imported statues. Her plaster boys piss chipped but adamantly into their cracked clam shells, her fisher girls wade through biker-oiled and bloodied ponds. The motorcycles dig up the lawn.

The aunt industriously instructs Min to line her pots of spiky palm along the fence closest to the road, pointing them out to be admired. Spiky palm’s hard to find these days, no longer fashionable, but as usual the aunt bargains them out with gingernut cookies and homemade achar. ‘Spiky palm points devils the other way,’ she explains, tired of strangers landing in her garden, without invitation.

The aunt’s godson, Mr Choo, comes to visit every few days. He comes bursting with News and Information, as if the aunt can’t read the afternoon papers herself, or doesn’t own two TVs, one stacked on top of the other. Colour on black-and-white. As if all he’s really after isn’t just ‘a little generosity, why not’ from the aunt. Being an educated man, as well as a mean hand at mahjong, Mr Choo can’t ask directly. He knows when to wait.

‘How are you today, Fatty?’ he calls to Min instead, easing himself into a bamboo armchair, sideways, not because he’s fat himself, but because his clothes are too thin. Horn-rimmed glasses give him two rows of eyebrows, fishtank eyeballs swimming every which way. Mr Choo used to be an accountant. Min watches him tabulate every item in the aunt’s sitting room.

‘Uncle. Hello, Uncle.’

‘Don’t tease her,’ the aunt scolds, as Min forces a smile and slips into the kitchen for soft drink. ‘It’s only puppy fat, she’ll grow out of it.’

‘Oh, I see. I beg pardon. I should call her slim. Slim! That’s what I’ll call her from now. You okay today, Slim?’

When Mr Choo visits, Min’s face becomes frugal. She scrapes her hair back and slouches her shoulders, her eyes as murky as a dead girl’s eyes in the poor print of the Chinese newspapers Mr Choo always produces, to illustrate the more unimaginable aspects of his news. ‘English papers are more civilized,’ the aunt remarks, dabbing a hankie to her nose.

Mr Choo also shows them photos of rarities, a boy with flipper arms who paints like ‘Malaysia’s own Rembrandt’, a holy calf with two heads. The jailed ex-Deputy Prime Minister with his soiled mattress and blackened eye. The oddly bland expression of a woman facing the death sentence for murdering her own children, as her lover had asked. He watches their faces as they look.

‘How can people behave like that?’ the aunt murmurs, sliding another peanut biscuit on to Mr Choo’s plate. ‘How can that be?’

‘Auntie,’ Mr Choo sprays a cloud of peanut-dust. ‘Auntie, in this world people will do anything, sadly. You scratch me, I scratch you.’

Because the aunt can’t take too much at her age, Mr Choo neither tells her all his stories, nor shows her all the clippings and photos he brings. He likes an air of mystery. His plump hands dip into his plastic bag like a magician’s, strange shapes blossoming as he fingers its contents for several minutes, with Min and the aunt rivetted to each crackle and crumple from deep within. Then Mr Choo smiles wickedly—flourishing a juicy soursop. The aunt’s favourite fruit.

Sometimes Mrs Choo also comes to visit, and then Mr Choo’s supply of News and Information is more restrained. Mrs Choo sits in the aunt’s front room with a crease drawn as dark as eyeliner down the powdery slope of her forehead. The English words circle around her like birds of prey, snare themselves in the glossy coils of her home-perm. Her glass of warm Fanta slowly grinds itself into one stockinged knee. Mr Choo can’t be bothered, but occasionally the aunt will translate some tidbit for her, and then Mrs Choo can nod seriously in agreement, or square her shoulders disapprovingly. She never offers an opinion of her own. Once the aunt was a schoolteacher to small children, so Mrs Choo obligingly shrinks to size. Once Mrs Choo was a shopkeeper and this is her demeanor, patient and accommodating, even when lacking the reassurance of a shop.

When the aunt beckons them to the garden to view her latest line of defences, Mr Choo murmurs, ‘If I may, more tea,’ and the aunt signals, and Min stays behind. She stands there beside him, pouring.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Beth Yahp.