A Yellow House Read online

  I said that cockroaches tasted vile, nothing like fruit at all, nor crispy, but like something that should be stuck to the bottom of your shoe. We looked at each other and doubled up laughing.

  ‘Did you ever eat chichak?’ I asked.

  ‘The lizard? No, have you?’

  I told her PoPo’s story, how they ate them in the war.

  ‘We should go and catch some,’ she joked, and then we were friends.

  Cat’s dad was with Singapore University now, doing important research on the funny nose monkeys, which were really called proboscis monkeys. Cat said they had some in the Singapore Zoo, and she would show me one day.

  I was jealous about almost everything in my new friend’s life. She lived in a house next to a nature reserve, and when you were there it felt like you were in the jungle. A jungle in Singapore, just a few minutes from the city. It was a revelation you could live like that, away from concrete or manicured parks. We had been to that nature reserve, hiked around the reservoir, but we always stuck to the boardwalks. Someone else, someone who’d just moved here, had to show me my own city.

  Mama said Cat’s family were maladjusted. I wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad. Dad had laughed then, and said they were just a bit wild. He said he’d take Cat’s dad out for drinks, but he never did.

  I would have loved to live in a house like Cat’s. Dad was all for it, but Mama said it would be full of snakes and bugs. I vehemently denied that when Mama said it, but later Cat admitted it was true. She’d seen two snakes since they’d moved in. As the daughter of a biologist, she could name them too. The first was a bronzeback tree snake, long, thin and pretty, curled around the bars of her sister’s bed frame. When I asked whether her sister had freaked out, she shrugged. Tree snakes, she said, were only mildly venomous. By bedtime, this one had long since vanished into the garden. The other snake had been a house wolf snake, again mildly venomous, curled around the base of the toilet one morning. Cat said that pythons could climb up through the pipes and bite you on your bum. I wasn’t sure if that was true, but I was always nervous when I used the toilet in her house.

  They had monkeys too. Normal monkeys, not proboscis monkeys, roaming over the fence, not understanding the difference between nature reserves and human streets. They swung through the trees in a troupe, some with babies clutching to their bellies. Cat and I would sit watching as they filed by in a row. They scaled a large palm leaf, one at a time, waited for it to sway and tilt, and then jumped off to the next tree, the leaf swaying back to its original position so the next member of the family could jump on. We would watch in silence, our flow of words temporarily halted while we sipped our Ribenas and looked on.

  Cat’s mother said the monkeys were a pest, and that she was tired of hiding all the food. Now that they’d learned to graze from human bins, they wouldn’t stay in the forest. One day, when I was there, she scolded Cat’s little brother Oliver for losing the toothpaste yet again. ‘Can’t you ever treat your things, our things, with some respect? What did you do to it?’

  We found the empty tube in the garden. It was only when Cat picked it up to bring it inside and incriminate her brother that we noticed the two large punctures in the side. Cat and I imagined a monkey, high up in the trees, snickering at us with a pearly white grin, wide as the Cheshire cat’s.

  Cat laughed when I said she lived in a jungle. ‘This isn’t a jungle. In Borneo there’s jungle.’

  Cat’s mother didn’t work outside the house. Anna, Cat’s older sister, spent most of her time in her room on her iPhone, unless her mother got too annoyed and confiscated it. Anna would be in a huff all afternoon if that happened, and still wouldn’t come out and play with us. They did have an aunty: her name was Mimi, and she was from Borneo. Mimi blended naturally into the jungle background, and didn’t speak much English. She’d been with the family since Cat’s little brother was born, which was longer ago than Cat could remember.

  Mimi was homesick often. In Borneo her whole family had lived together in the few small rooms that had been allocated to her behind Cat’s house, and she wasn’t used to living alone. Her husband was a policeman, and when he had lost his job they couldn’t afford to say no to the Singapore dollars Cat’s mother offered her if she’d follow them here. The money was good, but Cat worried Mimi would go home soon. She was lonely, and always looked sad.

  Cat’s brother Ollie was wild as a wolf, running amok in the greenery. He loved his catapult. He was only allowed to use it with the seeds of the large oil palm, not stones, as he promised his mother without looking her in the eyes. The monkeys grinned down at Ollie from the same palm he foraged under for seeds, but his catapult shots helped keep them under control.

  The monkeys ate the palm seeds and everything else. Bare green stalks adorned the side fence, where Cat’s mother’s orchid collection became monkey food as soon as their petals unfolded. The baby papaya tree was chomped up, stalk and leaves. In season, the monkeys hung out in the rambutan tree, throwing the peel and seeds on our heads.

  The best thing about Cat was that she could act as if I, not she, were the interesting one. It made me feel warm inside. But I much preferred listened to her telling me about Borneo, the proboscis monkeys, the snakes. She was a talker, bubbling like a cauldron. I used to be a talker too, before Jenny and the cockroach; but being ignored had turned me into a nobody, an observer, a listener. And nobody listened to a nobody, so what choice had I had? Cat was an asker too. She asked and asked till I spilt. When I told her about the kids on the bus, she said that I wasn’t the loser, they were. And she said what I did with Aunty M, helping the aunties, was the most phenomenal thing she’d ever heard.

  I loved being interesting, and showed her my red notebook. I made her swear never to tell anyone, and she said best friends never tell. When she said the words ‘best friends’ it felt like I was glowing inside. I could feel the cockroach gurgling as it

  slowly drowned.

  Every day at school, Cat grilled me on what I’d done the day before. She said she asked so much because she wanted to be a scientist when she grew up, and scientists needed to do that, so they could learn. She wanted to learn about Singapore, which I thought was weird. Singapore wasn’t like Borneo. It was just a city, where the biggest thing that happened was when the MRT trains broke down, and everyone was outraged as they’d be late for work. Or when it rained so hard that the drains overflowed and people got mad at the government for not controlling the weather. I suppose that deep down, I sensed there was another layer to Singapore, one I couldn’t find on my own. If PoPo had only still been there, she would know. She knew where to look, just like Cat knew where to look to find the magic in the little things, the magic that hid in old, chipped-on-the-edge things, not the new shiny ones most people preferred. Most people saw only the marble and the rubble.

  When I told Cat about PoPo, about being Peranakan, she loved it. But when I told her about Opa, secretly proud about that one fourth of me was Dutch like her, she wasn’t interested.

  ‘I have two opas already,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a PoPo.’

  I don’t have a PoPo either, not anymore, I wanted to say; but then I realised I still had her inside me. Cat wanted to have a grandmother like PoPo, and I wanted a dad that was a proboscis monkey expert.

  ‘Do you want to be a monkey scientist?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Cat, ‘I want to be an anthropologist, like Mama. They study people, not animals. I want to study your aunties.’

  It made me think about the aunties, and Mama’s fieldwork. I’d never studied them; I’d just tried to be their friend. I was fascinated by Cat, like she was fascinated by my aunties.

  25

  After Ronalyn, I’d been too terrified to eavesdrop – but Cat gave me my courage back with her talk of science and research. PoPo used to say that little pitchers had big ears whenever Mama, who was never sensitive to these things, was going on about something that PoPo felt I shouldn’t hear. It meant I had to s
cram.

  As for me, I’d learned to make myself invisible, and to recognise the change in tone that signalled a subject was coming up that was so interesting it wasn’t suitable for me. Many adults were too short-sighted to see the little pitchers lurking in the corner.

  Cat’s parents let us take the public bus home together, and after we alighted near her place we’d hang out at the food court, spending our pocket money on milo dinosaurs. Scooping the sweet powder off the iced chocolate malt drinks, we were scientists, anthropologists, doing research about gossiping. Cat’s fascination for the domestic workers had ignited something in me too, and rather than just helping individuals, I was keen to learn about the bigger picture. The question that inevitably arose next was why? Why did people treat others like that?

  We wedged in between people in the queue, next to tables with groups of women, or even sneaking up on people from behind, dawdling with big innocent eyes, on the prowl for spicy words. Sometimes conversations that seemed promising were hard to follow: people would speak fast, mumbling, and in any of Singapore’s accents and dialects. Cat, with her knack for languages, was fast becoming more fluent in Singlish than me, and the back of her red notebook was now a dictionary of phrases.

  Cat taught me to appreciate the language of my own country, the one that my mother looked down her nose at. It was much richer that I had imagined, so much deeper than yelling aiyoh, or sticking lah at the end of your sentences. Economical to the bare bones, one word of Singlish could say more than a whole string of them in conventional English. How to translate shiok, a word easily heard at a food stall? Delicious? Pleasurable? Amazing? Nah, the prata flatbreads we ordered at our favourite stall were just shiok, no other word for them.

  My best stories to listen to were still the ones about domestic workers. But they were hard to find; people didn’t hang about at food courts complaining about their maids all day. Some afternoons we’d be there for an hour, and all we got was boring stuff. Other days, we’d chance upon a conversation that was a sheer gem of nastiness.

  One afternoon, we managed to get seats right next to two women discussing a bad maid. One lady, dressed in a flowery skirt and green blouse and with a pile of shopping next to her feet, said she’d had one that was fine at first, but now, after two years, was always forgetting everything. She said, ‘That seems to be the norm, work performance drops drastically after contract renewal. Constantly forgetting stuff, dirty rooms. She now sibeh kayu. My washing machine, spoilt already. I told her to wash all by hand. I’m not buying her new one already. She spends so much time in the toilet oso. I need to send her home. This maid terok terok, annoying for me.’

  The other one, in track suit and trainers, replied, ‘Tsk, either they are ignorant of the consequences their absentmindedness could cause, or they simply lack a care attitude leh.’

  I wasn’t sure what on earth she was saying. With their jumble of dialect, long fancy words and random colloquialisms, Cat and I struggled to understand most of what these women were talking about – but our ears turned red nevertheless.

  Sporty lady added, as an afterthought, ‘Aiyoh, if they are blur, lost in their own world, it can mean she pregnant, and lost what to do, so can’t concentrate at work. That one blur like a sotong. There are signs to look out for. I think she busy using the hand phone in the toilet. Make sexy selfies for the boyfriend.’ She sighed. ‘I hope can get better one.’

  Flower skirt lady sipped her kopi and said, ‘No, all sama-sama. And I cannot tahan interviews. The agencies and the MOM, they don’t care about how employers feel, as long as you got a maid, money goes in their pocket, job is done. They tell you this maid has been trained how to take care of newborn baby, but in fact was just half-day course. Having own kids is not experience. These women, wah lau eh, so suaku. Don’t know how to do civilised way.’

  ‘True,’ nodded sporty one. ‘And the maid lie too. My last maid told me she loves kids, but after a while I found out she is a good cook, not interested my kids at all. They all lie. But you can tell from their attitude during interview already.’

  She shoved the plate of fried carrot cake in front of her towards her friend. ‘Want or not?’

  Flower skirt shook her head. ‘Nah. These Ang Moh, you know, they spoil the market. Easy for them, in their big houses. When I interviewed last time, they asked me if they will have private room. I told them nicely no, it depends where I want you to sleep. Sometimes in the study room alone, sometimes with my kids if required, though I never like a maid to sleep with my kids. After that I replied, if you not happy with my answer, you want a private room, you can pay me rental lah.’

  Sporty woman laughed. ‘Steady lah! Me same, don’t have space for private room. How big is my house? Am I a millionaire foreigner? No, just simple Singaporean. These maids, need money, so come to Singapore to work, right, to earn more? In their country, if it is so good, why not stay there? If they want a private room and eat like a queen, that means she not here to work. She want to be some ya ya queen? Can! Go stay at their own house and have an early night lor. Maybe it will come true in their dream.’

  They were now both laughing. Cat and I looked at each other.

  When we got to Cat’s house, we went over the conversation. We hadn’t understood everything but one thing was clear to us.

  ‘Those women talk as if the aunties are not human. Animals,’ Cat said.

  I nodded. ‘Shouldn’t the rules be the same for all people?’

  Cat grinned. ‘All people, and monkeys, and maids.’

  ‘I’m not sure whether you’d want the same rules for the monkeys. You’d have no bananas left.’

  ‘Or toothpaste,’ Cat added. ‘They stole it again yesterday. My teeth feel dirty, I had to brush without. They especially like Ollie’s strawberry-flavoured one. My mother said she’ll buy a box they can’t open to keep it in. The monkeys can’t just take what they want. ’

  I remembered the strawberry jam story, and how the Cynthia had bought the more expensive pineapple jam, just to spite her maid.

  ‘Wah adults so crazy lah,’ Cat said, overdoing her own attempt at Singlish when I told her.

  ‘They are,’ I said. ‘It’s like they don’t think about things. It’s no benefit to her to not get the jam. Why can’t she just go and buy her own jam? It’s not fair.’

  ‘You know what my mother always says?’ Cat said.

  ‘Well?’ I asked.

  Cat looked at me pointedly. ‘She says: Life’s not fair. Get used to it.’ She jumped up. ‘But anyway, adults are stupid, this goes to show. Let’s do something else.’

  She spotted some ants walking in a long file up the leg of the table, aiming to cross. ‘Look, ants. Let’s eat them!’

  There was a small nag in my stomach.

  Cat grinned. ‘You wanna go first?’

  I thought back at the cockroach incident. ‘Nah. You go first.’

  Cat shrugged. ‘Okay.’

  She laid her hand in front of the column, and several ants hiked up the hill of her thumb. She licked them up in one swoop.

  ‘They taste like nothing.’

  I squashed some on the tip of my index finger, and put them in my mouth. Cat was right. They were tasteless, so when I went home I had pineapple jam on my mind, not ants.

  26

  Mama’s good moods got more and more rare. She was irritable most of the time now. She kept complaining about her boss, asking Dad how she could prove herself if they didn’t give her any responsibility.

  Dad’s optimistic day-out-on-Sunday scheme was also wearing thin. Since dinners with the whole family were scarce, breakfast time had been appointed quality family time by Mama. The idea was nice, but I wasn’t a morning person and there was little real conversation. Aunty M would have her breakfast in the kitchen and Dad was forbidden his phone. Not that he stuck to that; his work too important to leave it further than a thumb’s length away.

  And then, for some reason, the school bus started coming twenty minute
s earlier and breakfast was squeezed into half an hour of Mama yelling at me to hurry up, yelling more frantically with every minute that passed. I hated the school bus. My main goal in the morning was to miss it, but Mama would never let that happen. She’d run around like a sheep dog, trying to get me to eat breakfast, get dressed, brush my teeth, put on shoes, comb my hair, wash my face, at the same time checking PE schedules, library books that had to be returned, and days overdue homework folders, stuffing them all into my too-heavy bag, often on the wrong days. Then she’d run out herself, just a few minutes before the bus arrived.

  Aunty M made my packed lunch, which was always sitting on the kitchen table before I got up, together with a full water bottle. For a while, she’d managed the packing of my bag too. She’d known exactly which days I had PE, or swimming, or the library. She even knew which books I’d finished and which I was still reading, leaving the half-read ones next to my bed to finish. This apparently offended Mama so much that she’d decided she would oversee the bag packing herself. She was my mother, after all, not Aunty M.

  But I never had enough time in the morning, and whilst Mama could manage a team of bankers without a struggle, which day I had PE eluded her. Aunty M would look on from behind the kitchen door, silently shaking her head without even moving it.

  One morning, Mama exploded. I was sat at the table with my eyes half shut, wearing my pyjamas because Mama didn’t trust me to keep my uniform clean, as if I were still a baby like Chloe. Dad was on the toilet, and had been for a while.

  Mama was yelling, and I shoved the Weetabix around the bowl to the rhythm.

  ‘You’d think half an hour is enough to eat breakfast! Seriously. Eat. Can you please put a bite in your mouth?’

  I looked up. The spoon was halfway to my mouth when she started again.