The Oddfits (7 page)

Scenes from the past he and Shwet Foo had shared together ran through his mind like a slideshow. Playing card games, Mastermind, and marbles with Shwet Foo on the floor of his parents’ old flat (and letting Shwet Foo win about a third of the time); playing “cops and robbers” in alleyways and market corridors; catching frogs in the park at night with a torch; Shwet Foo helping him collect stamps for his stamp collection; him scaring Shwet Foo with ghost stories of blood-sucking
pontianak
; Shwet Foo attending his school track meet and greeting him after his race with a clean hand towel and an icy-cold can of 100Plus; Shwet Foo ironing his uniform for him the night before the national debate championship while he practiced his speeches; him tutoring Shwet Foo in English; him tutoring Shwet Foo in science; him tutoring Shwet Foo in all subjects and secretly doing parts of his homework for him; Shwet Foo listening to him strategize about how to get Melinda Fong—his first crush—to talk to him; him giving Shwet Foo advice on how to ask a girl for a date (and Shwet Foo getting slapped by a girl in consequence); telling Shwet Foo about his basic-training experiences while on weekend leave over grilled chicken wings and coconut water at the shore; opening his student mailbox in California to find postcards and letters from Shwet Foo; and last but not least, Shwet Foo coming to the airport to welcome him home after his four years abroad.

That act of homecoming had been a particularly emotional time for Kay Huat. He remembered sitting on the plane, only half watching the movie playing on the personal television screen in front of him, engulfed in simultaneous regret and happiness. Unlike the majority of his peers who had come to the US on scholarships from the Singapore government, Kay Huat’s funding had come from Stanford itself, and as such, had no strings attached. He didn’t need to return to Singapore to fulfil a mandatory term of employment, and his friends envied him for it. “Eh, Kay Huat, what for you go back?” his friends had asked him at his goodbye party the night before.

“My father needs me,” he had answered, managing a halfhearted smile. His father really did. Kay Huat’s mother had passed away only weeks before he had departed for the US, and his father had spent the past four years wifeless and, effectively, childless. As an only son, Kay Huat had an obligation to return. And he wanted to. He missed home dearly, but he couldn’t help thinking about the opportunities that awaited him if he stayed abroad
. . .

Such thoughts had kept him awake all through the flight. But when, pushing his baggage trolley past customs through the automatic sliding glass doors, he saw them—his father and Shwet Foo standing side by side among the crowd, waving at him to get his attention—his doubt vanished and joy and relief washed over him like a gentle ocean wave.

“Ah-Boy, welcome home,” his father said, somewhat awkwardly.

Shwet Foo shyly handed him an oil-stained brown paper bag. “I got you curry puff. I thought maybe they don’t have in America.”

Wordlessly, Kay Huat had embraced his father, then his best friend.

With the unexpected wail of a tenor saxophone, Kay Huat drifted back into the present and looked over at his friend standing in the country western section staring dejectedly at the floor. And suddenly a pang of pity, a small one, skewered him neatly through the heart. Taking off the headphones and deciding to sample CDs some other day, he decided that his good friend Shwet Foo should be treated to some lunch.

Sneaking up on him from behind, Kay Huat put his arm around his friend and ruffled his hair. “I buy CDs some other time. Come, we go
makan
. My treat.” With that, they exited the store, Kay Huat firmly but gently steering Murgatroyd by his shoulders.

CHAPTER 7

Peculiarly enough, the pang of pity Kay Huat had felt for Murgatroyd remained with him, even after he and his best friend had finished lunch and parted ways. The pang seemed to have lodged itself in the region of his chest, making itself at home around his lungs and lower throat. Despite the frequent sips of warm tea Kay Huat took as he sat at his office desk, it would not go away. In fact, it was hanging around too long to be considered a mere pang. It was really more of a prolonged irritant. Whatever it was, it lingered on throughout the rest of his workday and persisted into the evening, when he left the office, got into his car, and drove to the Golden Serenity Hawker Centre in Ang Mo Kio to meet his father.

Deep down, he knew why the feeling was there. And he knew also that what he felt wasn’t just pity pure and simple—there was some guilt mixed in with it as well. Although he had told his friend otherwise, mingled with the odour of high-quality carbon and ink that had wafted up his nostrils as he had held that card to his face was also the unmistakable odour of truth. The card, its one-eyed bearer, and whatever mystery and adventure it hinted at—it was all genuine. The real deal. Kay Huat knew this instinctively, and Kay Huat was almost always right.

But really, he thought to himself as he waited for a stoplight to turn green, by hiding the truth he was doing his friend a favour. Whatever this “Quest” was, it was far too big and far too much for little Shwet Foo to handle. He had only lied to his friend to protect him from harm. Handling whatever this was would require someone far more capable and far more qualified.
Someone like
. . .

Catching a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror, he swept back a few stray hairs with his fingers and gave himself a roguish wink.

As was typical of a Friday night, Golden Serenity Hawker Centre was packed with hungry people in search of a good dinner and a chance to unwind after a long week of hard work. Golden Serenity was especially famous for two reasons: choice and cheapness. Choice: two whole stories of the open-air building were devoted to hawker stalls selling every possible local dish imaginable, and several of the stalls had won rave reviews from local publications and food lovers for their wares. Cheapness: the shoddiness and age of the building, not to mention the lack of air conditioning, kept most of the tourists away and the prices low. It was so crowded that Kay Huat had to circle around the car park a few times before a space finally opened up. He sighed and felt a bit annoyed at the fact that he had to do this every night. His father, Seng Hong Low, had owned and operated a char kway teow stall in this hawker centre for more than thirty years, and although Kay Huat had told him that he had more than enough money to support him in his old age, Seng the elder refused to retire.

“Ba, I make plenty of money now! Can support you in style, what! Can take you to restaurants. Can send you on nice vacation. No need to fry noodle all day. Time to enjoy your old age, lah.”

Seng Hong Low had frowned and waved away his upstart son with a dark, sinewy arm. “If I don’t work, got nothing to do. What for I sit around all day and grow fat? Live like that, might as well die! Anyway,” he said, tapping the side of his head with a bony index finger, “keeps my mind sharp!”

Only after months of pleading and persuasion did Seng Hong Low agree to leave his small HDB flat and move into his son’s luxurious two-bedroom condominium. But it was understood that, with his moving in, his son would never mention the possibility of his retirement from noodle frying ever again. And so, every weekday morning, Kay Huat dropped his father off at the hawker centre on his way to work; every weekday evening, Kay Huat gave his father a ride back home; and every Saturday and Sunday, at his own insistence, Seng Hong Low drove himself there and back in his own battered little white van.

Kay Huat believed that his father refused to retire out of pride. What Seng Hong Low didn’t tell his son was that his work also kept his mind off his wife, Kay Huat’s mother. She was dead, but the memory of her still brought on the dull, throbbing sensation of grief whenever he was idle. For all of his married life, he had worked hard and tended assiduously to his own health to ensure that his wife, the mother of his only son, would be well cared for during the remainder of his life, and well provided for after his death. What had never occurred to him was the unlikely possibility that he might outlive his wife, who suddenly and inexplicably died of a heart attack six years ago while she was brushing her teeth.

Hong Low dealt with the loss of his wife in the same way he had always dealt with any tragedy when it intruded upon his life—he worked harder. Saving up his wages from an assortment of jobs—janitor, night-shift security guard, electronics store clerk—Hong Low picked a space in Golden Serenity Hawker Centre to call his own, between Golden Treasure Pig Organ Soup (stall #01-52) and Melodee Fish-Head Curry (stall #01-54), and he pursued his true passion in life—making char kway teow. Even though he rarely indulged in the pan-fried noodles himself, preferring to subsist on a simple diet of watercress pork-rib soup and steamed rice, during the married years of his life, he had taken great joy in whipping up a plate of his wife’s favourite dish whenever he could and beaming with delight as she—skinny as a bird—gobbled up every last bit. At the age of thirty-seven, she died, small and avian-like as ever. And Hong Low never suspected the invisible toll that his lovingly prepared lard-coated noodles had taken on her arteries. Kay Huat had learned this from the doctor, but had successfully kept it secret from his father all these years: it would have destroyed Hong Low to know that he had contributed to his wife’s death. Now that she was dead, what could Seng Hong Low do but set up a char kway teow business—a poor man’s Taj Mahal in memory of a beloved wife?

Kay Huat emerged from his silver Porsche and sighed as he approached the crowded hawker centre. People. Always people. And sweaty people, no less. The heat from hundreds of individual stovetops and ovens and toasters and grills at each hawker stall, combined with the heat given off by hundreds of individual bodies compressed into a single space, combined with the fact plain and simple that Singapore was located on the equator, made the interior of Golden Serenity feel like the interior of a giant steamer. The ancient electric fans bolted to pillars overhead didn’t do much good on a night like this, although they made up for their lack of effectuality by sounding more like helicopters than temperature control units. As Kay Huat rolled up his shirtsleeves in preparation for forging his way to his father’s stall, he couldn’t help thinking of what the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had once written:
hell is other people
.

For dramatic effect, he stood on the threshold of the hawker centre and took a deep breath. He placed one foot, then the other, onto the white-tiled floor, which always looked grimy, even when it had been hosed down and scrubbed. And then, he plunged himself into the thick of it. Elbowing and shimmying his way between the customers queuing at the more popular hawker stalls and the customers seated at the densely packed green plastic tables, he arrived finally at stall #01-53: True Love Char Kway Teow.

But before approaching the stall, Kay Huat did what he always did. Standing behind a pillar about five metres away, he surreptitiously watched his father at work. The sheen of sweat on his father’s bald head, the face brown and flushed from the great flames of the gas stove, the wiry, muscular arm circling briskly over the massive wok, keeping its contents in perpetual agitation—Kay Huat took all of this in and was filled with admiration for the old man; all the labour and love he had put into caring for and providing for his family, which now only consisted of the two of them. And it occurred to him that he wanted to make the old man proud. Yes, Seng Kay Huat decided. His father was the reason for which he would undertake
. . .
well, what he was about to undertake, which, in another light, might have seemed downright dastardly. It was for Seng Hong Low and all that he as his son owed him that Kay Huat would seize this opportunity of a lifetime, even if it meant gently shifting it away from under his best friend’s nose. Interestingly enough, the sensations of pity and guilt that had been irritating him all afternoon subsided instantly. He felt much better. Perhaps it had just been indigestion.

Finally making his presence known, he walked up to the stall and nudged aside a skinny bespectacled teenager who had been waiting for his order.

“Hi, Ba.”

“Ah-Boy,” his father grunted. “How was your day?”

“Not bad, not bad.” Kay Huat entered the stall and stood beside Seng Hong Low. “Here, you go rest. I help you for a while.”

“No need, lah.”

“Never mind! Go rest, go rest.”

Pressing a dollar coin into his father’s hand and gently shooing him in the direction of the beverage stall, Kay Huat took over the wok. Illuminated by the glow of the bursts of flame that came shooting up from the stove, Kay Huat’s natural aura shone all the more brightly. Even the sweat that rolled down his face looked like drops of liquid gold, and passing patrons stopped briefly in front of the stall to gape in admiration.

By the time Kay Huat and Hong Low had finished with the day’s closing, it was a little after eleven. As the car sped home, they sat together, quiet and exhausted. Hong Low was struggling to keep from nodding off.

“Ba, if you’re too tired, I can drive you tomorrow morning.”

“No need, Ah-Boy. Saturdays and Sundays, I drive myself.”

Kay Huat let a minute pass, and then tried again. “Ba, I not doing anything tomorrow. Let me drive, lah.”

Hong Low lost his temper. “Already said no need! So difficult for you to understand, is it?”

“Okay, okay.” Kay Huat tried to soothe him. “Sorry, Ba. Just trying to help.”

Hong Low immediately felt sorry for his outburst and tried to lighten the mood. “Eh, Ah-Boy. If you want to help, why don’t you find a nice girl to marry and give me grandchildren?”

He was only half joking, and Kay Huat sensed this. Hong Low saw his son frown and hunch forward, as if he were concentrating on the road. “Maybe someday, Ba. No time for girls now.”

“If not now, when?” Seng Hong Low had always been curious about the conspicuous absence of romance in his son’s life. He was always working. Always working on work. Always working on activities. Always working on something. He was beginning to suspect that his son was gay.

“Later, lah. I’m still young.”

“
Aiyah
. You don’t want to get married, is it?

“I do, but not now.”

“Then what are you waiting for?”

Kay Huat wondered if he should tell his father the truth. What he was waiting for the world to discover was that he—Seng Kay Huat—was a great man. That he was waiting to become the Great Singaporean Novelist. That he was waiting to rise up through the ranks of the private bank and become one of its top executives. No, it went beyond even that. He was waiting to invent something, to do something, to
be
something. Waiting until he was on the cover of
TIME
or
Asiaweek
. Waiting to win the Nobel Prize. He was waiting for something even bigger and better than all of these things. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for; he only knew that at times the world seemed too small, too petty, to accommodate his ambitions. He was waiting to
achieve greatness
, and he wasn’t going to let any pretty girl sidetrack him or tie him down in the meantime.

“Did you hear me, Ah-Boy? What are you waiting for?”

I’m waiting for something that could be just around the corner! Something that I’ll find out the moment we get home and I pick up the telephone!

Seng Hong Low threw up his hands at Kay Huat’s stubborn silence, and the last five minutes of the drive passed without another word.

Once they arrived home, Hong Low went to take a shower before collapsing into bed. Kay Huat retreated to his room. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, he picked up the telephone on his nightstand. His fingers trembled as he dialled the number he had taken the trouble to memorize earlier that day.

We’re sorry. The number that you have dialled is incorrect.

He tried thirteen more times, but to no avail. “Damn it,” he muttered as he slammed the handset down in frustration. How could this be? He was never wrong. He waited ten minutes and then tried again.
We’re sorry. The number that you have dialled is incorrect.

“I am
not
incorrect!” he snarled. Sitting heavily on the edge of his bed, he gripped at his hair in frustration and took several deep breaths to calm himself down.
I am never incorrect
, he thought. It was all very strange.

Seng Kay Huat had no idea just
how
strange it all was. He scoured the Internet until two in the morning, searching for any hint of information about the Quest and about Ann, but he found nothing. And yet, even as Kay Huat had been dialling the number for the sixth time, another phone call to that very same number had gone out from Murgatroyd’s home. And, without any trouble at all, Murgatroyd had gotten through.