Let's go back to the years before.
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Back then we had to earn our keep. I was only seventeen, and at the time, it wasn't too old an age to work. An education had to be earned, and earn it I did. My mother found me some employment in the city, a twenty minutes walk from my old village in the countryside; near enough, yet it was a different world from the one I grew up in.
In the village we had five households, sixty three people, and their names I could recite for you even today, though the place where it used to stand is graced by a road intersection and the forlorn privilege of perching myself on that very spot and looking around in nostalgic silence has been long taken from me.
You have to understand what it must have been like, a lanky wide-eyed country boy standing in the noisy rice shop as about fifty sweaty men bustled about with their rice sacks, struggling to listen to the instructions being shouted at me in Hokkien by the towkay. He shouted because there was no other way to be heard, not that I could hear him anyway, one moment I was peering into the dim mass of frenetically moving people, next thing I knew, a piece of paper with an address scrawled on it was thrust into my hand and I was shown the exit with a rice bag over my shoulder.
And so I set off on my journey across the cramped and foreign land. The city wasn't too big, but the roads certainly took some getting used to. The way people clustered themselves along the narrow walkways that lined the open streets, not walking straight down the middle like they always did in the countryside. No, the road was for the rich. The rich and their rickshaws and trishaws and the expensive Ford vehicles. The noise too, was something that kept at me, kept reminding me of the strangeness of the land.
I followed the directions the towkay had shouted at me with great difficulty, but after asking multiple strangers and flashing the address at them, I found myself in a cramped damp alley. For the first time in the town I heard silence; the occasional car engine echoed into that narrow space from what seemed an eternity away, and all was quiet save the dripping of water from the rooftops, forming themselves into shallow stagnant pools all around.
I made my way slowly down the alley, all too aware of the splashes my feet made in the puddles, doing my best to skip over them whenever I could, ignoring the load on my back. I was younger and stronger then you see. I came to a rusty plate in the wall. Number 17. The door next to it that served as the entrance into the building was broken, hanging off it's hinge, and I stepped in softly.
Everything on the inside was old too. The cobwebs were there in the corners if you looked, the sheets of calligraphy that hung on the walls, hinting at long gone opulence, were yellowed and stained. I was to go up to the second floor, and the wooden rotten stairs made no noise as I climbed upwards.
The door to the apartment, or room, or flat at 2B was red. At least it had been red once, now it was red, speckled with black, brown, white and brown where all the wood had come off in strips. I rapped on the door and I called out, the knock sounding unusually loud in the confined landing between the stairs and the door and it swung open almost immediately, as if I had been expected all along. Not simply expected, because I surely was, but as if I had been waited for.
The old man muttered as he let me in, pushing over pieces of junk on the floor to make way for me as I entered the room, I suppose he was scolding me for being late but I had been too busy staring at the glowing box in the corner of the dark room. That was the first time I had ever seen a television, the miracle picture machine and it's strange filtered way of delivering sounds. Distorted. Foreign.
"Ah Kim ah!" He bellowed at the top of his lungs, startling me. City folk are strange people. Nowadays they, you all I mean speak so fast. Back then, they would shout for nothing. The living room was cramped, almost claustrophobic, and he had a need to shout. But yes, for the first time I noticed the old woman who lay in a massive foreign chair facing the tv. Her eyes closed. She did not stir.
"The rice is finally here, we can eat soon." He brayed, ignorant to the fact that Ah Kim didn't quite seem to care. Or move actually. A chill started at the tip of my fingers.
He grabbed the rice bag from me, his sinewy limbs deceptively strong and clattered his way across the room. He stood by the chair and regarded her. "Ah Kim ah, are you cooking today?"
"No?"
He paused as I stood there in silence. I wondered if I should say something. But didn't.
The old man bustled off into the kitchen, swinging in the rice sack as he did. "Hang on, I'll get the money. You stay right there." A moment later, I heard a great crashing sound of pots and cymbals. "Just hang in a bit" he shouted.
I leaned over as the ringing faded into emptiness again. The old woman was still lying there, completely motionless. She wasn't breathing, and her leathery speckled skin was cold to the touch.
A sudden fanfare from the television startled me, and I jumped back as a man in a suit appeared on the screen to synthesised applause and the old man creaked back into the room, shuffling notes in his hand and peering at them with thick squarish glasses. The type that you see nowadays occasionally, in joke shops.
He looked up after counting the money and caught me staring at her. Rolling his eyes he said, "I know she's a little weird at times, excuse her." Flashing a look towards the chair he raised his voice again. "Ah Kim ah, this is the last time I'm cooking this week. I swear."
"She's been sitting there for days, lazy pig. Kim ah, please send our visitor off."
I backed out of that strange place with the money, leaving him behind by himself, only letting myself shed a tear once I was out of the building, out of the alley where he wouldn't hear me. That affection in his voice you see, was and is to this day the plainest purest love I've ever heard.
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I paid a lot of attention to the sounds I used in this story. I don't know why. I just did it halfway through and I played it up once I realised what I was doing. Don't know if you noticed.
As with a lot of my stories, I started with the ending, made a long start and somehow worked my way there. At the same time, the protagonist doesn't speak. He doesn't say something, not til years later. I didn't realise it until now.
I wonder what it could mean.
(;
And with that I've broken my four month long creative drought. Thank you all.
