The South: A Novel
Date: 2025-05-26T14:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Literary; Lgbtq+; Gay; World Literature; Southeast Asia
Description: A luminous and intimate novel about the weight of inheritance, the bonds of loyalty, and the awakening of love, set against the backdrop of a changing Malaysia. The South unfolds during a visit by the Lim family to their rural clan estate after a long absence. Jay, in his mid-teens, and his two older sisters are less than thrilled to leave their city for the remote house in the south, but their parents, Sui Ching and Jack, are adamant. Jay finds he's expected to share a room with Chuan, the son of the estate's overseer, a bit older than Jay but seemingly much more mature and capable in the wor
Publisher: Penguin Group

The South

Tash Aw

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk

HarperCollinsPublishers

Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper,

Dublin 1, D01 C9W8, Ireland

First published in Great Britain in 2025 by 4th Estate

Copyright © Tash Aw 2025

Tash Aw asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Without limiting the author’s and publisher’s exclusive rights, any unauthorised use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is expressly prohibited. HarperCollins also exercise their rights under Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790 and expressly reserve this publication from the text and data-mining exception.

Source ISBN: 9780008637606

Ebook Edition © January 2025 ISBN: 9780008637620

Version: 2025-01-22

Note to Readers

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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008637606

for Francis

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Two boys walk through the scant shade of an orchard, far from the house where they are staying. It is just after midday, the sun at its fiercest, no one else around. In this light the land shimmers uncertainly before them. It hasn’t rained for months; the vegetation, usually heavy with moisture, has turned pale and brittle. These past few days the air itself has become so hot and dry that it singes the boys’ throats when they breathe.

Light a match and the whole country could go up in flames – one of the boys says. His name is Jay. He picks a path through the long coarse grass that slashes at his calves, crisscrossing them with fine, exquisite cuts that will smart when he washes himself later that day, though he has grown used to the pain, in fact barely recognises it as such. The undergrowth here is a tangle of thorns, and each evening Jay finds small wounds on his arms and legs that leave bright red stains on his towel and bedsheet, yet mostly, he isn’t even aware that his skin has been punctured.

The boys walk steadily, pushing towards the deep shadows in the middle of the orchard.

I call them boys but in truth they are no longer boys. What are they, then – because they are not yet men? Maybe it isn’t important to know at this precise moment. When they have reached the base of the biggest tree, the boys look up at the branches, forked and twisted with age. Jay reaches out and touches the trunk, his fingers tracing the shallow crevices. Soon it will be cut down, along with all the others. They are diseased, the boys have been told, and have to be destroyed.

Trees like this can live for hundreds of years, Jay says. In India there’s one that’s a thousand years old.

Did you read that in one of your books, the other boy asks, though it doesn’t sound like a question – he isn’t interested in the age of trees; he isn’t interested in the trees at all, even though they are part of the landscape he has known all his life.

Cutting down a tree is worse than killing a human being, Jay says, staring at the branches.

The boy laughs, though it is not a cheerful sound, just a low rumble in his throat. What do you know about death, he says. His name is Chuan. Have you ever killed anyone?

Jay feels him come close but he doesn’t turn around. He feels the breath on the back of his neck, though maybe it is just his heightened imagination, because he has been longing for this moment for some days now; and in his longing he has anticipated the way every second will unfold – the way he will touch and be touched, the smooth-sticky quality of Chuan’s skin, the things they will say to each other. He knows every detail before it happens. All he has to do now is wait.

He feels Chuan’s hands on his shoulders, close to the nape of his neck. ‘I hope we can save these trees,’ he says, still looking up at the leaves overhead. Jay imagines turning, slowly, to look at Chuan, until one of them – it doesn’t matter who – reaches out and touches the other’s face. But he won’t; he is seized by something between fear and indecision. What will he discover if he looks at the other boy now?

Turn around, Jay, turn around.

But he is unable to move; he finds that his body has become foreign. For so many years he has yearned for someone to touch him in this way – for the freedom he will experience. He imagined the clarity of the joy he would feel, how he would savour every gesture. Maybe he is afraid of this liberation, and what it might lead to. It is the first time he has felt his body slipping away from his control. In the future there will be other occasions in other places far from here, and he will grow accustomed to it, but for now this sensation is new.

I hope we can save these trees, he says again, looking skyward. On the lower branches he sees a large bird that he cannot identify. A tiny hawk, or an oversized cuckoo. It’s hard to tell against the light. The bird is looking back at him – studying him. He wonders if this is a good omen, or a bad one.

He feels Chuan’s hands grip his shoulders, a neutral, warm pressure at first which then begins to hurt slightly, though the pain is not unpleasant. Now, at last, he begins to turn around, but Chuan is pushing down on him hard, urging him towards the tree trunk until his face is pressed against it. The bark is rough and he knows that if he struggles his skin will be grazed and perhaps even bloodied – marked by his desire, which he will not be able to hide from the world.

With his feet, Chuan nudges Jay’s apart, and Jay feels his hands fumbling to pull his shorts down, but the Velcro buckle gets caught in the waistband and the fabric bunches up around Jay’s hips. He reaches down to untangle the mess, and now he can feel Chuan’s body, lean and taut, pressing against him as he frees himself from his shorts. Again, Jay tries to turn around; he wants to appreciate these first few minutes, stretching them out in his mind so that whatever time they have together will feel like many hours, a whole day. That was how he has imagined the first time. But Chuan is pushing against him, he is older and stronger than Jay, his forearm is lodged against Jay’s back, and Jay is momentarily startled by Chuan’s strength, even though he knows he shouldn’t be – Chuan’s body is a product of this landscape, after all, unyielding and harsh. What surprises him most is the thought that Chuan wants their first moments of closeness to be over as swiftly as possible. To accelerate each second and collapse time – the opposite of what Jay seeks.

When it is over – less than two minutes later, according to Jay’s estimate – Chuan rests his head in the space between Jay’s neck and shoulder.

I want to be with you, he says. Forever.

Jay nods. In that moment, forever seems like a comforting notion. But at that age, what does either of them really know about time?

That year we went south for the holidays at the end of the school year, instead of travelling north to visit my grandmother, who was in the final stages of a disease that none of the doctors could identify, a combination of osteoporosis and old age that would eventually render her weak and docile, but which at that point had simply made her unpredictable and bad-tempered. She had been in fine health all her life and was not used to relying on other people for help with domestic chores or even, sometimes, bathing, and her sudden decline came as a shock to everyone, herself most of all. Up until she turned seventy-seven, she had been fit and capable of walking to the market and carrying the shopping back on her own, of staying out reasonably late with friends in the small town she lived in, which had become a popular destination for tourists, a development she found amusing. People driving three hours to her local coffee shop! She would laugh. Then, earlier that year, she had stumbled on the half-step down into her kitchen, broken her hip, and was immobile for many weeks. Her mood changed, she became disagreeable, and most of all she was alone.

My grandfather had died the previous year. His passing took no one by surprise; he was much older than her and had been ill for many years, and my grandmother was relieved of the burden of caring for him. It was a shame that her freedom lasted only a year before she, too, began to deteriorate, long before she should have. My parents didn’t talk much about my grandparents’ illnesses – we were not the kind of family to express pain of any kind, believing that discussing difficult matters would make them worse. But I was sixteen and understood that my grandmother wouldn’t hold out for long.

For a few months that year, my parents become moody and silent, keeping quiet even at mealtimes. My sisters, Lina and Yin, were convinced that they’d had a fight and were on the brink of divorce, whereas I saw a different reason for their introspection: my grandfather’s death and my grandmother’s subsequent struggles troubled them because they, too, were separated by a fifteen-year age gap and must have been wondering what the next two decades held for them. My father, in particular, was at the age where minor, passing health issues were starting to become permanent ones.

It was my mother who decided that we would go south that year, to give my grandmother some space to recover from her illness. Old people were easily disturbed, she explained; they liked to have their meals at exactly the same time each day and hated it when the kids messed with the TV channels. ‘All that noise isn’t good for her,’ she said. This made sense, but also raised certain questions. Why leave an ageing person when she was clearly in need of support? And why did my father, who usually made all the important decisions at home, agree? He, of all people, did not like change. He’d refused to move even as our house had become mouldy and damp due to constant leaks that could never be identified; he’d decided that I, the youngest child, should wear my sisters’ hand-me-downs. He never bought new clothes, never thought of looking for a different job despite my mother bemoaning his schoolteacher’s salary, hadn’t changed our car for as long as I’d been alive – why didn’t he protest?

The truth was that my mother had never got along with my grandmother, who believed that my father could have done better than her. He was handsome, an intellectual who came from a family that was comfortable, if not as rich as they would have liked; their social status could so easily have been improved through marriage. I think my grandmother had visions of my father marrying into the kind of old Chinese family that streets and buildings in the city were named after. What better way for a family of immigrants to ensure that they were part of the history, and future, of the country? Instead, Jack married a girl from the provinces who would always hold him back.

Sui Ching is just a country girl – my mother would sometimes mimic my grandmother saying this, though never in front of my father. Her lack of closeness to my grandmother was always passed off as a joke, but I came to see it as a deeper source of sadness for my mother. She’d been a student – his student – when she met my father, and she’d never graduated; her in-laws had held so many prejudices against her that she knew she would spend a lifetime trying to overcome them.

Still, my mother played at being the dutiful daughter-in-law, cooking meals whenever we stayed with our grandmother, cleaning her house, bringing her expensive presents of abalone and dried mushrooms from the city – all the things that she was supposed to do. Perhaps she thought that she would wear my grandmother down, but even when it was clear that her efforts were failing, she maintained appearances – if only to keep the peace with my father, I think, whose fidelity to his mother was unshakeable. When my mother was just about to give birth to Yin, and Lina was just two years old, my father left my mother alone in the hospital and drove three hours to see my grandmother, who had fallen ill – with what turned out to be a cold. He didn’t make it back in time for Yin’s birth. (This was a tale my mother repeated over the years, as proof of my father’s loyalties.)

My mother had liked my grandfather. He was a benign presence who often seemed trapped in his own world, long before dementia took hold. He was already in his eighties when I was old enough to be conscious of his presence, and I remember only a tall, slender man who walked without assistance despite his increasing fragility. He didn’t speak much and spent a lot of time dozing in front of the TV, removed from the rest of the family, his head tucked deeply so that it rested on his collarbone. ‘Look at that poor man,’ my mother would say. ‘Fifty years with your grandmother . . .’

Our departure to the south felt like a form of revenge for my mother after all these years, particularly at a time when my grandmother was very sick. At least that’s how I saw it.

‘They’re about to divorce,’ Lina insisted. As long as I could remember, she had been hoping that my parents would split up. ‘Men and women aren’t made to live with each other,’ she said as we packed our bags. ‘It’ll be the best thing they’ve ever done.’ She was four years older than me and spoke with a wisdom that I felt was beyond reproach, so for a long time, I also believed that our parents would break up sooner or later.

There was another, more pressing reason behind my mother’s wish to go south. After my grandfather’s death, there had been some talk about inheritance, and about how little he possessed, seeing as he had once run a business that distributed spare parts for cars throughout the far northeast. There was a shop-house in K., a village not far from where my grandmother lived, rented out to a pawnbroker for a miserly sum; a barren piece of land in the south that my grandfather had bought just after the war; and a small amount of cash held in the bank, intended for nursing-home bills but ultimately unnecessary, seeing as he refused to leave home even in his final weeks. When my grandfather passed, my father was dispatched to review the will with a lawyer; his two brothers, who had good jobs and lived abroad, couldn’t be bothered. At that meeting, my father discovered that this modest fortune would be divided equally between him and his brothers, except for one item: the piece of land in the south, twenty hectares of scrubby jungle and farmland, which would be left solely to my mother.

‘It’s worth nothing,’ she said, trying her best to sound casual, even a bit burdened by the news. ‘But we still have to go and check up on it.’

In the weeks leading up to our departure, my mother was filled with energy, preparing bags of clothing and parcels of food as if we’d be gone for months, with the possibility of no return. My sisters chuckled at these elaborate preparations. ‘For God’s sake, I looked at the map, it’s only four or five hours’ drive,’ Lina said. ‘Why’s she behaving like we’re moving to a different country?’

‘How long are we going for?’ I asked my mother as I watched her carefully folding some towels and easing them into a raffia bag.

She shrugged. ‘Depends.’

‘Depends on what?’

‘On what it’s like down there.’

Lina woke me before dawn on the day we were due to leave. ‘Hurry up, the crazy old people are going to get mad if you don’t get up and have breakfast soon. They’ve already loaded everything into the car.’

During that period I was always tired. A late growth spurt, explained a neighbour when my mother complained. My bones were stretching, the neighbour explained, all the muscles were being pulled in different directions, so even in sleep I was being worn out by the effort of growing. I hated the idea of my body changing in my sleep, beyond my control. I was also troubled about the lateness of this change – I was just a few months away from my seventeenth birthday – which I took to be a sign of abnormality. But it was true, I was always exhausted, and that morning it was a particular struggle to get out of bed. The last thing I wanted was to get in a car to travel to a place I didn’t know. I drank a glass of water and forced down a piece of bread. ‘Better eat something,’ my mother said. ‘It’s going to be a long drive.’

Fong waits outside the house, scanning the line of trees in the distance for an approaching car, but none comes. They are late, this family arriving from the capital. Perhaps he has written the wrong date on the calendar that hangs on the kitchen wall. He rang them in the morning to confirm, but all he heard was the eerie hollow tone, ringing out. He hates phones, and is glad that the one in the house rarely rings these days.

From where he stands on the veranda, he notes the shrinking patch of lawn in front of the house. Why does he insist on calling the veranda the veranda, and the lawn the lawn? Neither is what it used to be; those words are vestiges of the past. A few years ago, some of the timber pillars that held up the roof of the veranda were smashed when a lorry backed into it, the wooden platform splintering under the collapsed beams. Fong had thought of calling Jack immediately, to tell him what had happened, but it was the middle of the night and Jack was not known for his patience. He was curt at the best of times, with a notoriously quick temper. There were stories of: how, following an argument with his ageing father, he abandoned him alone at a roadside stop, miles from home; how he shut his five-year-old son in the bathroom for a whole day for wetting his bed; how he locked the front gates to their house because his fifteen-year-old daughter still hadn’t returned home a few minutes past the ten o’clock curfew he’d set (she appeared rattling the iron grilles not long afterwards).

Fong hadn’t wanted to test Jack’s temper that late at night, and by the morning, when he’d had the chance to survey the damage, he decided that pulling down the rickety structure and replacing it with something modern and solid would be the best solution. There was just enough in the farm cashbox for him to do that; he wouldn’t need to ask Jack for more. The fact that the new concrete structure didn’t at all resemble the old veranda would be forgiven because Fong hadn’t requested new funds. ‘You’re the farm manager – that means you have to manage things,’ Jack once told him, when Fong had called with news of a flood, as if Fong could control the weather. Jack hadn’t been concerned by the failure of the harvest, only by the resulting cost of repairing the damage to the land.

Indeed, money has always been the source of Fong’s tensions with Jack. He understands the greasy workings of money, appreciates its ability to reduce everyone to the same level, even a man like Jack Lim, who spends his life wrestling with mathematical problems. ‘We can understand everything in the world using maths,’ Jack said to Fong when he visited the farm many years ago. Jack had been working on a pile of papers spread all over the kitchen table, so that everyone else had to eat their dinner crouching on low stools, the food laid out before them on pieces of newspaper spread on the floor. No one complained, they were happy to clear the space for Jack’s work, which was more important than their meals. When Fong looked at the papers he was captivated by the pictures, the beautiful bulbous shapes and perfect variations of squares, which didn’t look to him like mathematics at all, but the products of hallucination, a dream.

Jack had noticed Fong’s fascination with his work, and started to elaborate, taking every opportunity to display his scholarship. ‘They’re called fractals,’ he said, but after a sentence or two he trailed off, retreating into his calculations. Fong would never be able to grasp even the basics of Jack’s work; every word of explanation was like the quick cut of a blade, an insult that articulated the divide between them.

Still, both men understood money. They knew what it could achieve, and how it could maintain the hierarchy that separated them. The mathematical equation was easy: Jack’s money + status = Fong’s dependency + perpetual labour. How would it look if you deducted Jack’s money and added it to Fong’s labour?

(It hadn’t helped that Fong had been the person driving the lorry that crashed into the veranda. Friends, drinking in Kota Tinggi: the usual story.)

As he waits, he remembers how the lawn used to extend to the stream, before the dam was built upriver when the water levels were higher. Its neat delineations made the house seem more civilised, even attractive. The old man had planted it in the Sixties, when there were still sufficient farmworkers for such frivolous tasks as mowing. Now the scrubby bushes have encroached on the grass, making it seem like an accidental clearing in a forest rather than a lawn. No matter how often he trims the undergrowth, he can’t stop its progress. Fong knows that Jack will have something to say about it, a passing comment to show that nothing escapes his censure, even though he professes not to care about the running of the farm. The last few months of drought have dried up the stream, which is now merely a deep ditch carpeted with weeds.

The stream the lawn the veranda.

Vestiges.

We stood on the top step of the porch and argued about what to call the place – the right name seemed important.

‘A dried-out swamp,’ Lina said. ‘A wasteland, that’s what it is.’

During the drive my parents had been calling it the farm, even the family farm, making it sound both expansive and a part of our heritage, even though we had never been there. The idea of being landowners seemed preposterous, more so given the untamed and neglected land before us. It was true that there were trees in the distance, arranged in a more or less orderly fashion, but to call the place a farm was an exaggeration – where were the machines, the workers, the division of the land?

‘I hate this place,’ Yin said, fanning herself with a folded newspaper. ‘It’s so hot and creepy.’ She swept her hair back from her face. That year, on the verge of leaving for college, she had grown it out. She’d started to wear different clothes – light, flowing blouses, cotton trousers, a few skirts – nothing too radical, and certainly not enough to incite comments from my father. She was good at judging how far to push him, and knew when to pull back. Her new way of dressing made her look increasingly like my mother; maybe that was why my father approved of it.

*

Yin and Lina would share a room with two narrow beds. I’d sleep in a room down the corridor, separated from the other bedrooms by a store-room filled with boxes covered with a blue tarpaulin. On the floor beside the bed, a thin mattress had been laid out. Although no one had said so, I knew that I was meant to take the bed, and that someone else would sleep beneath me. I felt like an interloper from the start.

The room was painted a shade of green that had faded over the years to become almost white, and the walls were unadorned except for a calendar that showed a picture of a young woman in a bathing suit sitting on a rock by a waterfall opened to July, though it was December.

When I went downstairs, the others were gathered in the kitchen having a mid-afternoon snack. On the table there was a plate of biscuits and a dish of freshly sliced purple dragon fruit that had left drops of brightly coloured juice on the table.

‘Your bed’s okay?’ Fong, the farm manager, asked. I gathered that he had lived on the property for many years. He was sorry that it was so hot, he hadn’t known weather like this since 1984, or was it 1985, he couldn’t remember. Still, it was better than the storms they’d had the previous year, or even worse, twenty years ago when the farm flooded and the electricity went out for weeks.

‘You’re not responsible for the weather,’ my mother said, stirring a spoonful of instant coffee into a mug of hot water for my father. He was reading a newspaper and reached for the coffee without looking up.

Fong continued to apologise for things that were wrong with the house: he’d meant to change the stools we were sitting on, they were so old, probably older than us; the windows didn’t close properly; some of the steps on the staircase were uneven; there wasn’t enough ventilation. It must be hard for us, coming from the city where we were used to air-conditioning and high-speed modern fans.

As he spoke, he ran a damp cloth over the counters. ‘I thought I’d cleaned the house but there’s dust everywhere. This damn weather . . .’

‘Stop it, Fong,’ my mother said. Her sudden interjection made my father look up momentarily before returning to his paper. I couldn’t tell if her tone was authoritative or sympathetic. Fong paused, rinsed the cloth under the tap, moving more slowly. It was as if my mother’s command was familiar – comforting, even. ‘Come, sit and have something to eat with us,’ she said, more gently now.

‘I’m not hungry,’ he said, settling on a stool next to me that creaked as he moved. Without being asked, he gave us news of the farm – he had hired three Indonesian workers earlier that year, hardworking guys who lived in the store-house right next to the harvested crops, so for a while there was never any theft, no fear of losing any of the tools or machinery, the men keeping an eye on everything; but then, earlier that year, with the start of the drought, there wasn’t enough work, so one of them left – you know what they’re like, they can just disappear overnight – and the other two found work nearby. Sometimes they came and helped when there was enough to do, otherwise it was just him – and Chuan, when he was around, which wasn’t so often.

‘How’s Chuan doing?’ my mother said.

Fong shrugged. ‘The same as always.’

‘What does that mean? You forget, we haven’t seen him for ten years. I don’t even know how old he is.’ My mother stood up to boil water again.

‘Nineteen. Totally out of control these days. He does exactly what he wants – never listens to anything I say.’

My mother laughed. ‘At that age they’re all like that. It’s normal.’

‘Sui Ching is right,’ my father said, taking a sip of coffee. ‘Look at what we have to put up with these days.’

Lina took a handful of biscuits and headed for the door. ‘I’m going for a walk. If I get eaten by tigers don’t bother salvaging my remains.’

‘There aren’t any tigers left. Leopards, maybe, not tigers,’ my father said – perhaps the most he had spoken to Lina in many months. She had come back from her first semester at university in Penang exactly a year before with her hair shaved short on the sides, and a tiny jewelled nose stud. My mother was the first to express shock, for Lina, like Yin, had inherited my mother’s thick, glossy hair, much admired by friends. She also had a tattoo on her wrist – ‘Just a stick-on,’ she’d confided in me, ‘but don’t tell them! I want them to think it’s permanent’ – that showed every time she lit a cigarette, a new habit I suspected she’d adopted largely to challenge my father’s patience.

Once Lina had left, my father folded his paper neatly and asked Fong exactly what Chuan was up to. He adopted his schoolteacher’s expression, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the table. Chuan had found a part-time job at the 7-Eleven in town, Fong said, about 5 miles away, which wasn’t wonderful, but without qualifications, it was hard for him to find anything better. He would start low and work his way up. Problem was, now he was totally independent, Fong couldn’t really be sure what he was doing. One day a friend of Fong’s saw him at a seaside restaurant near Tanjung S. – an hour away – with a girl, in the middle of the afternoon when he was supposed to be at work. Sometimes he would stay out overnight, even two nights, without letting Fong know. At first Fong was worried, and once even called the police, who weren’t interested – why would they be? A Chinese kid who didn’t come home for a couple of days, who cares? When he asked Chuan why he hadn’t called or texted, guess what he said? No more credit. That was his excuse. Yet he was always texting, always making calls to God knows who.

‘It’ll be fine,’ my mother said over the whistling of the kettle. ‘He’s young, he has plenty of time ahead of him.’

‘Plenty of time – huh.’ Fong laughed, a soft deflated noise. ‘That’s exactly what he says. He’s young. Why should he have to get serious now? That’s the problem when you fail all your subjects and leave school at seventeen. All those years ahead of you but no idea what to do with them.’

Fong reached for a biscuit and broke it in half. Chuan had always been independent, even as a small boy, he said. With only Fong to look after him, he had to be, but now he didn’t answer to Fong or anyone else. He had his own money now, he could do what the hell he liked – that’s what he told Fong every time they had an argument.

‘What can I say to that?’ Fong popped half the biscuit in his mouth.

‘Not much,’ my mother replied. ‘You’ve done your best with him – it’s tough, raising a child on your own.’

‘He’s a good kid,’ Fong said. ‘Sometimes.’

‘Maybe he could go back to school,’ my father said. ‘Get some technical qualifications or something like that – otherwise he’ll just waste his life away.’

I knew that last comment was aimed partly at me. I wasn’t failing at school, but I wasn’t exactly succeeding. My teachers didn’t care; they had too many others to keep an eye on, and besides, failure was more common than success at schools like ours. I’d never got in serious trouble, hadn’t been suspended or even punished apart from on one or two occasions. No complaints, your son is totally ordinary, one of my teachers had told my father. But as a teacher himself, my father took this as an insult.

‘School isn’t for everyone,’ my mother said. ‘There’s no point forcing your son to study if he doesn’t want to.’

Fong nodded. ‘I can’t force him to do anything.’

‘I guess he could always work on the farm – take over from you and make it a success.’ My father stood up and folded his newspaper.

‘Is Chuan coming back tonight?’ I asked. ‘I really don’t mind sleeping on the floor.’

‘That might be good for you – toughen you up a bit.’ My father stretched and yawned. ‘I’m going to lie down for a while before dinner.’

‘Take the bed,’ Fong said to me. ‘Really. Who knows when that kid will come back? I told him this morning that you were coming but he said he had a double shift, so maybe he’ll be gone till morning.’

Yin and I went out to look for Lina. We walked away from the house towards the fields of long thorny grass and the forest that lay ahead. On one side of the path the narrow stream snaked in and out of view, obscured by reeds; on the other side we could make out rusty bits of metal, the remains of an old car, overwhelmed by creepers and weeds, and a hangar or barn beyond it – an open-sided structure with a metal roof. A flock of birds landed in the trees above us, squawking as they settled. We laughed nervously at the noise they made, which sounded almost human, and comically vulgar, unlike anything we’d heard before. We started towards the hangar but realised it was much further away than we’d thought.

‘I bet that’s where she is,’ I said.

Yin nodded. ‘Always escaping as far as she can.’

The heat was less fierce now and the shadows lengthened across the path. Gritty dust had worked its way into our shoes, scraping our feet and making it difficult to walk fast. An indistinct grey animal slipped smoothly out of a thicket of trees and Yin let out a low cry of shock, which stopped the creature in mid-glide on the path ahead of us – a deer, which didn’t seem to have spotted us until that instant. It looked at us and lifted its head, testing the air and, detecting no threat, it picked its way slowly into the grass before trotting off into the forest. In that moment of stillness, held by the falling light, the deer had seemed almost unreal in its magnificence. We had been startled by its size and its very presence, even though we were the intruders.

Yin stopped and held my arm. I didn’t know if it was to comfort me or herself.

We had to shield our eyes against the slanting rays of the sun. Still we couldn’t see Lina anywhere.

It was the second day of December. There were four weeks left in the month.

Sui knows what the house will look like even before the bend in the road brings it into view. She has imagined this moment of return many times over the past decade, recreating every detail of the house as she approaches it: the way it perches on the low slope of the land, shrinking into the murky backdrop of the old rubber trees; the green paint on the timber cladding faded with time so that it looks barely coloured; the uneven ridge of the roof. Now, the house shimmers in the distance, hovering as if detached from the land, and because the car is juddering on the uneven dirt track, Sui is unable to fix her gaze on it, unable to gauge how far away it is. It has always seemed beyond her reach.

She has no illusions of romance or beauty. She has received occasional snippets of news of the house and the estate over the years, and has adjusted her reconstructed image to take them into account. In 1991 a portion of the roof collapsed after particularly heavy rains – thankfully over the utility area, which housed the kitchen and toilets – and was replaced by corrugated zinc sheets instead of clay tiles, which would have been too costly. The handsome semicircle of trees that her father-in-law had planted nearly half a century earlier had been uprooted in a storm (how many, she’d wanted to ask – all of them?). The handsome timber veranda had become riddled with termites or beetles or some other pest and had to be replaced with a modern concrete porch. Jack had reported these events in passing, each one a brief afterthought.

Our stupid currency is worth nothing these days, the Americans are screwing us, we can’t afford a new car, and by the way the old orchard is being ripped out.

Did you see, the Prime Minister’s best buddy got arrested with a suitcase of cash in Australia, what a bunch of thieves they are, oh, I heard the stream at the farm got contaminated by toxic waste.

I’m up for promotion, can you imagine, your husband might get the top job! Did I tell you the farm manager’s been sick for a few months?

Toxic. A few months. She’d held the information silently inside her and waited for the right moment to ask Jack for more information, but for many days he spoke only of his potential new post, which was of more obvious use to the family than her own concerns – her hopes and anxieties. The things that mattered to her at the time, she realised, were secondary to his concerns. It was hard not to see her entire married life in these terms.

Not much longer to go now. They have turned off the main road, leaving the grey tarmac behind them and slowing down as they ease their way onto the dirt track. It seems less rutted than before, and a bit wider. Sui remembers the way the tips of the overhanging branches brushed against the car the first time she came here, more than twenty years ago; she could have reached out, if she’d wanted to, and caressed the leaves. But now the forest seems at a safe distance from the car, the foliage covered in the pale rust-coloured dust thrown up by the car.

Jack has slowed right down, the engine of the Volvo wheezing as he shifts between first and second gears. I wish Fong would just tarmac this whole damn road, he says, and curses under his breath, two tight Hokkien syllables. One of the children coughs in the back seat – Jay, of course, always observant, always vigilant. She has to keep an eye on that one. Unlike his sisters, he doesn’t say much; sometimes she wonders what his silence holds. All three have been quiet up to this point – dozing, Sui imagines, but the rocking of the car has woken them up, and now the girls are groaning and complaining. Have we reached the end of the earth yet? Why don’t we just drive to the Sahara, it’ll be closer. We need some water.

The windows are rolled up against the dust outside, and the car’s air-conditioning has never worked properly. Sui feels pinpricks of sweat form on her forehead and dabs at her face with a small square towel. She finds it hard to breathe. She wonders who will be at the house, whether anyone will be there to greet them. Maybe no one.

At last – there it is, smaller than she remembers, but less dilapidated than in her imaginings. Neither the patches of zinc roof nor the cheap incongruous modern porch can change the way the house occupies the land around it, almost obscured from view but still, somehow, undiminished.

That first morning, the house was silent when I woke up. I’d fallen asleep quickly, even though I’d been anxious about taking Chuan’s room. I imagined him returning to find a strange body in his bed. He would have resented my presence, and it was fear of this resentment that made me uneasy. At some point I thought I heard him enter the room, and though I tried to get up I couldn’t, I just lay there from exhaustion, mostly asleep but not completely. Get out of my bed – I heard him say in my half-awake state. Jay. What the hell are you doing here? What the hell, get out. Maybe I was dreaming, because when I woke up the thin mattress remained undisturbed. I’d placed my bag next to it – that, too, hadn’t been moved.

Downstairs, Yin was in the kitchen. She had washed and dried the dishes and glasses from breakfast and arranged them in neat stacks on the table, next to a copy of Vogue that she’d brought with her from home. She looked at it as she wiped the pan with smooth methodical swipes and only looked up when I asked her where the others were. ‘Outside somewhere,’ she replied, shrugging.

‘Need help?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s fine. You know I don’t like mess.’ Her phone began to vibrate on the table, the small square screen flashing green. She stared at it for a few seconds but allowed it to ring while she continued with her task of drying a pan that was already dry.

Outside, in the dazzling light of the morning, the farm looked bleached of life. My parents were walking back up the slope towards the house, across the clearing where we’d parked, my mother shielding her face with a newspaper so that her famously pale complexion, of which she was very proud, wouldn’t get brown in the sun. She angled her face away from the sun, or maybe away from my father, because from a distance it looked as if the newspaper was a barrier she’d erected so that she wouldn’t have to see him walking next to her. She was a few steps ahead of him, striding quickly.

‘You finally decided to wake up,’ my father called to me as they approached the house.

‘Did you eat?’ my mother said as she came into the shade of the porch, fanning herself with the newspaper.

‘There wasn’t anything left.’

‘I cleared it away,’ my father said, easing himself into a crusty old rattan chair that creaked when he sat down. ‘Flies were getting to it, and anyway it’s going to be lunchtime soon.’

‘Where’s Lina?’

‘God only knows. Fong isn’t the only one with a wayward child.’ He took off his sunglasses and replaced them with his usual pair, which had narrow steel rims that made him look older than he was, and he was already considered old. At the neighbourhood bus stop waiting to go to school, the other kids would often make jokes about him. Is that your grandfather? I thought of elderly people as fragile creatures at the mercy of others, but my father was the very opposite of that.

He took off his glasses and wiped them with a small cloth that he kept folded in his shirt pocket – it was one of his habits, compulsively cleaning the lenses – and as he looked at me, blinking, his eyes looked pale and his cheeks sunken. I tried to imagine him as an elderly man, frail, weak, unable to stand up without my support, and grateful when I led him by the arm to go out for a short stroll around the garden. I liked to do this from time to time, to think of him divested of his power. I’d feel more comfortable with him then, almost an equal. But I knew that even when he reached ninety, a hundred, he would be the same as he was now.

‘Put on some proper shoes and go and join the others.’

‘Who?’

‘Fong and the men. Down in the hangar.’

‘Why?’

My father turned so that he was looking straight at me. At moments like these I knew how his students felt, the precise way in which they might have detested him when he came into the classroom. His slender, bony outline accentuated his severity; his stillness made you feel as though you’d committed an offence before you’d even considered it. When he stared at you, you began to see yourself the way he did, lacking in some way.

‘They’re short of manpower. They need help,’ he explained slowly. ‘You need to grow up a bit, take on some responsibility in life. Some physical work will toughen you up.’

There had been a lot of talk in recent months about my growing up, but no one could really explain to me what that process involved. There was the question of my lacklustre studies, the reports from other parents in the neighbourhood of changes in my behaviour: my timidity, the fact that I didn’t like sports, how I avoided the other boys at school – even those who had once been friends. They told their parents that something funny was going on with me. The neighbours wondered. Was I okay? These questions were expressed as concern. Why had I disappeared from school two days in a row, just after the break? (My parents hadn’t even known about these absences.) Why did I fall asleep during lessons so often? When had I become so withdrawn?

Teenagers – you know what they’re like! My mother tried to laugh it off in public, but at home she was constantly worn down with worry. The problem was not so much with me, but with what life held in store for me. In a couple of years, I would be leaving school and would either have to get a job or go to college, and the prospects of either were not good. My parents hoped for the latter, even as they knew they couldn’t afford tuition fees, and there were no jobs.

There had been a lot of talk about money that year, or rather, the lack of it, not just in my family but everywhere in town. One week there was a rush for cash, rumours of the ATMs being drained, long queues at the bank as people got desperate. The headlines were grim, a constant haze of bad news from around the region. Thailand, Korea, Indonesia – all of them were in the same position as us. ‘It’s America’s fault,’ friends of my parents said, repeating government press releases. ‘The West wants to strangle us.’ The Prime Minister appeared on TV and blamed the crisis on the IMF, George Soros, ‘the Jews’, everyone he could think of. We laughed at every pronouncement he made and decided that he had gone mad, but of course we were afraid.

At school, in the space of a few days just before term ended, five boys in my class had to leave because their parents had lost their jobs and could no longer afford their homes in the capital. These families returned to the provinces, where they could at least stay with relatives until the turmoil was over, though no one knew how long it would last. In the classroom their chairs were placed upside down on the vacated desks as if to commemorate past lives. They were now consigned to history and we no longer spoke about them.

I knew I’d have to get a scholarship, but my grades weren’t promising. I was condemned, as my father said, to a life of mediocrity. I didn’t know what a mediocre life looked like, exactly, but I thought it resembled my father’s. He was a lecturer at a second-rate technical college and had recently been passed over for a promotion, for the second or third time since I was old enough to understand what it meant to work for a living, and this time felt final. He was nearing sixty and should have been thinking of retiring, but frustration kept him going – as if by refusing to give up, he was demonstrating some higher quality invisible to everyone but himself. The more trapped he became in his work, the more severe he became with his children, especially me, as if he was afraid of being tainted by me and my failure at school.

‘But how am I supposed to help?’ I protested.

‘Just do what they say. Don’t be an embarrassment.’ He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.

*

In the hangar I found two men loading a small open-top lorry with blue plastic crates of fruit. One of them carried the crates to the edge of the lorry, the other collected them and stacked them in neat piles, tucking one crate in beside the other with the rhythmic precision of the video games that people played at school. Fong stood nearby, smoking a cigarette while tucking his half-buttoned shirt into his trousers. His hair was wet, as if he’d just stepped out of the shower; from somewhere unseen I could hear the noise of splashing water.

Fong smiled and took his cigarette out of his mouth. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said. His voice was low, each word enunciated, giving him an air of patience, even kindness.

‘Dad said you needed help.’

‘Hai,’ he sighed, as slowly as he spoke. ‘We don’t need any help. We’re nearly done anyway. Look,’ he said, pointing to the two men, ‘Budi and Eka came back to work for a couple of days. We’ll be finished very soon.’

‘I could help them carry that stuff, save them some time.’

‘That stuff,’ Fong laughed. I wondered how life might have been if he had been my father. When he laughed I felt that we were part of a joke I had made, even though he was my mother’s age. I imagined him married to my mother. Would a young, vital husband have encouraged her to be more energetic and amusing than she was, or would she have grown tired of his youthfulness? I wondered if he was forgiving and forgetful as a father, as opposed to rigid and all-controlling the way Jack was. ‘You mean the harvest,’ he said, taking a long drag of his cigarette before flicking it to the concrete floor of the hangar and grinding his shoe thoroughly onto it. ‘Everything’s so dry, we have to be careful even with the tiniest sparks. If you’ve seen a forest fire once, you’ll never want to see another.’

‘Have you ever had one here?’

He nodded. ‘A long time ago. That part of the land caught fire.’ He pointed vaguely to a spot over my shoulder. Luckily he’d seen it start, an orange glow that at first he thought was a trick of the light, a reflection from the setting sun. He’d just moved to the farm and everything was strange, even the light. Later he found a jerrycan of petrol. Someone had started it, he didn’t know who – some kids playing around, probably.

The sound of water stopped and a young man appeared from around the corner, towelling his hair dry. He was shirtless and wearing long Liverpool FC shorts that were too big for him; they sat below his waist and revealed the sharp indentations of his hip bones, and as he walked the hems swirled around his knees. They looked as though they might fall off completely at any moment. Without introduction, I knew that he was the person whose room I had taken over. He shared his father’s features: slim nose and clear eyes, tanned skin accentuated by working outdoors. His hair was shaved short at the sides with the fringe left long and dyed a dirty blond.

‘Here’s our hero,’ Fong said in his slow, jovial manner, but Chuan didn’t laugh. He sloped off to collect his T-shirt, which was hanging on a hook. The words VENICE BEACH sat above a setting sun and a curving wave across the chest when he put it on. Fong tossed him a set of keys, which he caught without seeming even to look; his hand simply opened and closed, and the keys were in his fist.

The men were loading the last of the crates. Fong checked his watch and said, ‘Better hurry.’

‘I know, I know,’ Chuan replied as he headed for the driver’s side of the lorry.

Fong turned to me. ‘How about you go with our hero to town – keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn’t drive too fast? And make sure he brings back all the money the wholesaler gives him!’

Budi and Eka climbed onto the lorry and pulled the low metal door shut before tucking themselves in beside the crates, their knees drawn up towards their chests.

Chuan turned the keys two or three times before the lorry rattled to life.

*

The countryside rolled past us, the forest giving away to stretches of palm oil plantations before regaining its ground, a blur of drab green vegetation punctuated by small clusters of houses set back from the road. Teenagers and old women on their scooters eased onto the road, sometimes looking as if they would ride straight into our path but always curving just in time. In any case, we weren’t driving fast and neither were they; everything was slowed by the heat. Even the stray dogs that sauntered across the tarmac didn’t bother to trot.

The dust blew in from the open window and made me cough. Chuan reached into the side of his seat and handed me a half-drunk bottle of water, which was unpleasantly warm, having obviously been there for some time.

‘You’re not used to the heat,’ he said.

‘It’s not any hotter here than it is at home.’

‘But I bet you don’t have to spend much time outdoors when you’re there.’ He looked at me, his eyes moving from my face to my arms and my knees, as if to prove to himself that I was as unsuited to the climate as he thought.

‘Did you come home late last night?’ I asked, ready to apologise for having taken his bed.

‘I didn’t come back.’ He fumbled for the packet of Marlboros that had dropped into the space between our seats, and I fished them out for him. When I opened the pack I saw there was only one left. I drew it out and handed it to him before crushing the wrapper in my hand. He trapped it between his lips and reached for the lighter in his pocket. ‘We’ll buy some more in town,’ he mumbled.

‘Where were you, then?’ I asked. I wasn’t sure if he was smiling or just taking a drag of his cigarette.

‘At a friend’s place near work. I did the night shift, finished late. Wasn’t worth the trip.’

‘A friend?’

‘Yes. Don’t you have friends? I do that all the time when I work late. I always have a day off the following day. I sleep in or come back and help out around the farm if there’s anything that needs doing. Like today. It’s not going to be for long, though – I’m getting out of here. Maybe as far as Singapore.’

‘What will your father do?’

He shrugged. ‘The old man does what he wants with his life, I do what I want with mine.’

‘What will you do with your day off?’

‘So many questions – are you always so nosey?’

We were approaching the outskirts of town, the villages giving way to rows of single-storey houses that lined the streets – the same kind of houses that you saw everywhere in the country, in exactly the same kind of residential area on the fringes of provincial towns. They were only twenty or thirty years old but already looked shabby, white paint flecked with moss, rainwater drains clogged with weeds and little barrages of plastic bags and tin cans and other debris.

At the traffic light Chuan leaned his head out of his window and whistled to catch someone’s attention. He did so by sticking two fingers under his tongue like an actor in a movie, and the noise it made, sudden and powerful, startled me. A young woman turned and lifted her head; she had been looking downwards as though measuring the distance between each step she took, or avoiding the gaps in the paving, but now she stood still. Chuan whistled again, and she waved before coming towards us. She was wearing huge black sunglasses and her fringe was dyed the same hue of sandy blond as Chuan’s hair.

‘Slaving for the old man again?’ she said.

‘Story of my life,’ Chuan replied. ‘Tell you what – since you care about me so much, I’ll tell him you’ll go and work for him instead. He’ll pay you extra for night-time services.’

She pushed her sunglasses up until they were perched on her head. ‘You’re so funny.’ When she laughed, creases formed around her eyes and across her brow. ‘Who’s the kid?’ She lifted her chin in my direction.

‘Cousin,’ Chuan said.

‘You have a cousin? That’s news to me. Father’s side or mother’s side?’

‘What’s with the interrogation today? He’s not really my cousin, just distant family visiting for a while.’

Cars were honking behind us but Chuan didn’t seem to hear them; they began to pass us in the opposite lane, accelerating and honking more as they went past.

‘See you tonight?’ the woman said as Chuan cranked the engine into gear.

‘Who knows?’ he called out as we pulled away. She cursed, a swear word I didn’t quite catch, and Chuan laughed.

‘Is she your girlfriend?’ I asked.

‘Why you so nosey?’

Around us the surprisingly wide streets of the small town were busy with cars and scooters, but many of the shops had closed for good, their windows brushed on the inside with a chalky whitewash that obscured their interiors so that it was impossible to discern what kind of businesses had thrived within these hollowed-out spaces. Brightly coloured posters with the name of the realtors and their mobile phone numbers were plastered over the glass, advertising their sale or rent, yet it was obvious there were no takers; no wonder Chuan was hopeful of renting a room in town. Outside a bank there was a long line of people waiting patiently to get in. The ATM had been boarded up and I presumed that people were trying to get some cash.

‘Her name is Jessie,’ Chuan said eventually, not answering my question. ‘We used to work in the same place.’

The wholesaler was already waiting by the market when we arrived. ‘You’re late,’ he grumbled. He had smooth, almost glossy skin, and eyes that shrank into his cheeks. ‘I don’t know why I bother to wait on time.’ I got out and went to the back of the lorry, leaving Chuan to speak to the man. I didn’t want to witness their interaction – the man seemed on the point of rudeness, and I was afraid of how Chuan might react; of the conflict that might follow.

Budi stood on the platform and handed the crates to me and Eka. I followed Eka’s lead and carried each of them to the shaded area nearby. They weren’t so heavy, and I was surprised by how smoothly I worked. The merchant came round the side of the lorry and watched us unload. ‘Is that all?’ he said. ‘Your father promised me double what you brought last time.’

Chuan laughed this off and I thought maybe I’d got things wrong, I didn’t understand how country people spoke to each other. Perhaps they were joking. ‘This is the best produce in the world,’ Chuan said. He went to pat the merchant on the back in a friendly gesture as he went past him, but the man pushed his hand away.

‘Don’t play the idiot. Every delivery gets smaller and smaller. Everything on that shitty farm of yours is going to die soon.’

I took a crate from Budi and as I turned, my shoe snagged on a stone. Don’t let go of the crate, don’t let it drop – I thought to myself as I fell. I landed first on one knee before lurching forward, then my chin caught the side of the crate as it finally slipped from my grasp. How strange they looked, I thought, the oval-shaped fruit rolling unevenly across the dusty surface of the road. The merchant stooped to pick one up. He held it in front of Chuan’s face and said, ‘Look at how small this is. It’s as small as your dick. Is this a joke? I’m giving you five hundred, no more.’

We picked up the stray fruit from the ground and finished the rest of the unloading. Then we stopped off at a sundry store to buy some cigarettes and a few chicken baos. Chuan went to the refrigerated cabinets and took three bottles of Carlsberg. When he asked what I wanted, I said I wanted the same, but he just laughed. ‘You must be kidding,’ he said and got me a Pepsi instead. We stood outside finishing our drinks and he gave the men a ten-ringgit note each.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Chuan when we were halfway home.

‘What for? It’s not your fault that man is a bastard.’

‘I don’t know how I dropped the fruit. One moment it was fine, next moment it was all over the floor.’

‘No big deal. He didn’t pay us for it anyway.’

‘I know. Sorry all the same.’

He turned to look at me, his eyes narrowing slightly in concentration, as if noticing me for the first time. ‘You’re bleeding,’ he said, touching his own chin lightly to indicate where the wound was. He reached for a small towel wedged between the dashboard the windscreen and handed it to me. When I pressed it to my face it felt warm on my skin.

‘You know the worst thing about that man is that he’s right. Our farm is dying.’ Chuan gazed out at the road and reached for the pack of cigarettes that had, again, fallen into the space between us. I gave him one as I’d done before. ‘My father can’t manage, with or without me. The drought this year killed everything.’

‘It’s called El Niño,’ I said. ‘It means “the little boy”. Don’t ask me why it’s called that.’

‘The fuck?’

It was a cyclical weather system, I explained, caused by the movement of warm currents in the Pacific. I repeated what I’d read in the newspapers and heard on TV: we were undergoing the most severe occurrence of El Niño on record. It wasn’t just out here in the countryside that water supplies were low – even in the city we’d had water cuts. Some days we’d turn on the taps and find just a trickle of earthy brown sludge. Elsewhere in the world there were terrible floods. Half of China was underwater.

Chuan listened intently, occasionally looking across at me. ‘Huh,’ he exclaimed. ‘We’re all being fucked up by The Boy.’

We laughed. The Boy was a dangerous son of a bitch!

The roads began to empty the closer we got to the farm, with just a few cars passing now and then, heading in the opposite direction, back to town. Already I was beginning to recognise a few landmarks that indicated the way back: the hill in the shape of a low uneven triangle, the abandoned wooden house marooned in the middle of a field of weeds, the faded billboard advertising a whitening face cream. The models were still smiling, bleached in the sun; the paper had peeled off so that in place of one of the model’s ears was a large hole that revealed the trees beyond, as if she was listening to the forest. If I got lost, I thought, all I’d have to do was to look out for the model with the hollow ear and I’d know I could find my way back.

‘Are you coming home tonight?’ I asked Chuan. ‘Or staying with your friend?’

He turned to look at me, almost smiling. He took a last drag from his cigarette before handing it to me. The smoke curled from its tip like a question mark.

What can you say of a woman who is already pregnant at her own wedding? Thank goodness she was only three months along, the swell of her belly concealed by the cleverly cut dresses, loose enough to throw off scrutiny of her figure, but not so loose as to suggest that she was hiding something. It helped that her taste in clothes was, let’s try to be polite about this, unconventional, that she was always going against the flow, so when she appeared at the wedding in her unflattering dress that hung straight from shoulder to ankle, it was taken to be the height of fashion. She’s a bit of a rebel, they said, before all the men got drunk and everyone forgot about her outfit. It was true that young people everywhere were dressing differently then, especially in the cities, those ridiculous trousers with flared hems trailing in the dirt, all the fabrics printed with swirling or geometric patterns in variations of brown and orange, the men leaving their hair long, the women cropping it short. But even compared to most, Sui stood out. The bright red scarf that she tied around her head when she went out for dinner at that big noisy Chinese restaurant on Imbi Road, together with sunglasses and a huge grey blouse – she looked like a construction worker who dreamed of being Jackie Kennedy.

That’s what Jack’s family said, at least. Their comments weren’t entirely unfair, even Sui had to admit that. In the wedding photos, she stuck out, an oddity. Even in the portraits of her and Jack, she wore her veiled headpiece at an angle, striking a pose with her hand on her hip as though on a cover of one of those magazines for modern women imported from Hong Kong or Japan or Australia. Jack’s formality didn’t help, standing stiffly with his arms by his sides. His suit was as dull as you would imagine of a man like him, the mathematics teacher who found clothes and ceremony trivial. He smiled dutifully, like he had more important things to deal with. Of course they were separated by a decade and a half in age, but they could have been born in different eras altogether – he in a previous century, she dragged back in time from the next millennium. The contrast was so great that they appeared to be not so much a union but a collision.

That wasn’t the only visible clash that occurred during the wedding. Sui’s side of the family, fresh from the countryside – a village so obscure that they had to say, as she did, near Batu G, which was itself provincial, though at least identifiable on a map – huddled in small groups at the banquet, their hunched-over postures making the round tables look far bigger than they were. When Sui and Jack stood on the stage of the ballroom of the Merlin Hotel, raising their glasses for the toast, relatives appeared to her illuminated as if by a searchlight. Their pressed white short-sleeved shirts and baggy slacks, the same for men and women, seemed like an insult to the shiny elegance of Jack’s family. She had always thought of herself as special, and her in-laws as conservative, but now she realised that the opposite was true: she was one of the dull villagers and Jack’s side was extravagant as they raised their glasses, shimmering in the light. Her people had to look around them and figure out what to do next. They didn’t know whether to laugh at the jokes during the speeches, and were unsure when to applaud, when to raise their glasses. They looked lost, those poor village folk. Please, she wanted to scream at them, please blend in, please change. When she raised her glass, she found she was crying. Too much emotion, people said later – tears of joy!

The photographer was standing next to her, the temporary brilliance of the flashbulb turning the room ghostly and white. ‘I’ve taken a photo from your viewpoint,’ the photographer said, ‘so that even when you’re very old you’ll remember exactly what you’re seeing now.’

‘Time to wake up,’ Fong said gently, his voice a low rumble at first, then more urgent. Wake up. He padded so softly back down the corridor that the floorboards didn’t creak once. The first thing I did as I sat up was to look at Chuan’s mattress at the foot of the bed. Even in the dark I could tell that he’d come back the previous night and slept there. The pillow had been pushed into a corner and the thin cotton sheet that he’d used as a blanket was half unfurled. I’d thought that I hadn’t slept much – I’d been waiting for him to come back – but in fact I hadn’t heard him walk in, undress, go to bed and wake up again. How dark it was at that time of the morning, I thought. The glow from my watch was the only light there was: 5:08 a.m.

I had agreed to a routine, which surprised my parents: each day I would wake up in time to join the men in whatever work was needed. The drought that year meant there wasn’t much fruit left on the trees, Fong explained, but there was always maintenance, land that needed to be cleared, trees cut back. I would learn as I went around with the men, he said; I’d get the hang of it.

Fong was making some instant coffee when I came downstairs, stirring it so gently that the spoon made only the faintest clink against the sides of the mug. At that time of day, I would soon learn, there was a sudden stilling of sound, a contrast to the cacophony at bedtime, when the jungle insects were at their loudest and it felt as though the entire forest might crash through the walls of the house. In the pre-dawn lull, there was a hush so heavy that even the soft squeak of my rubber sandals on the floor were an intrusion into the calm. Fong poured some condensed milk into the mug and swirled the coffee again. He placed it on the table for me.

‘I’m not allowed to have coffee,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

I shrugged. ‘My dad says I’m too young.’

He pushed the mug towards me anyway. ‘You need some strength if you’re going out to work.’ He spread some slices of white bread with margarine and strawberry jam. He held up the jam jar and smiled. ‘I bought this specially for you – I thought you’d like it.’

I nodded. In fact we didn’t eat strawberry or any kind of jam at home. My father had done a lot of reading into nutrition and considered sugar to be poison; he didn’t want us exposed to damaging foods like that.

‘Where’s Chuan?’ I asked, eating quickly. ‘Has he gone into town?’

‘No, he only works there three or four days a week. He’s out there working with the men.’ He motioned with his hand to the fields beyond.

I could make out the lights in the hangar the moment I stepped out of the house, a mere fluorescent pinprick in the dark. I walked swiftly through the gloom, surprised by how I had already become acquainted with the path.

‘Look who’s here,’ Chuan said when I stepped into the glare of the lights. Budi and Eka were fixing what looked to be lengths of rubber hosing together to make one long tube, and Chuan had some bits of metal in his hand – a blade, a chain, some sort of machinery. ‘The kid’s going to help us today.’

‘Hello, kid,’ the men laughed. They repeated the Cantonese word that Chuan had used, which had become my name, as if I didn’t already have one. Sai lo, sai lo, they would call out to me over the noise of whatever we were doing.

I watched them carry on with their tasks, each of them moving with a clarity that made me feel clumsy even though I was just standing still. ‘What can I do?’ I asked, but no one looked up. Eventually Chuan said, ‘I’m trying to think of something.’

‘I’ll just do whatever you’re doing.’

He looked up at me; first, briefly, at my face, then at my legs and feet, and the mere feeling of his gaze passing over me made me feel physically inadequate. He was trying to decide if my body could withstand the rigour of a day working outdoors, and I knew I had already failed the test. ‘Problem is,’ he said, with the same patience his father displayed, ‘we’re doing heavy work today. Clearing some land. You don’t know how to use a chainsaw or anything.’ He pointed at a pile of tools and it was true, I’d never seen anything like them. ‘They’re dangerous if you don’t know how to use them.’

‘Why don’t you teach me?’

He smiled. ‘We have to get going soon. We don’t have much time before it gets hot. Why don’t you just hang out here?’ He sprayed himself with deodorant, a pungent musky perfume that I recognised from school, where some of the older boys used it after football matches, the chemical sweetness of the scent mixing with sweat to produce an odour that should have been unpleasant – that was unpleasant – but which I still breathed in. (The advertisement on TV starred a famous mixed-race actor who, having applied the deodorant to his armpits after his workout, found women mysteriously gliding up to him as he walked down the street, grinning.)

‘I’ll come anyway, see if I can learn something.’

He just shrugged, but I followed him and the others out to the fields.

There was a point in the morning when the light changed, the sun brightening as suddenly as it faded at the end of the afternoon. There was almost no transition between day and night. Our lives in the city must have been subject to exactly the same abrupt switch, but I’d never noticed it. Streetlamps came on automatically and so did the headlights of cars, and there was so much light from the office blocks and apartment buildings that we lost the distinction between seeing and not seeing.

I followed the men towards the field, an orchard of young trees that had wilted and died in the drought. Deer had stripped the bark off the saplings and made them susceptible to disease; they hadn’t lasted more than their second year. Beyond the sphere of light cast by Budi’s headlamp I could barely make out the shapes of the trees, and tried to keep close to Chuan so that I wouldn’t fall behind, but all at once, they each pulled away from the group and dispersed among the trees and then I was alone. I heard the machines start up, and the whipping sound of long grass being slashed to the ground, the occasional sharp rasping of blade on stone. Occasionally, guided by the rattle of an approaching machine, I would catch a glimpse of a body before it disappeared again. The air smelled of gasoline and crushed leaves.

The day was breaking swiftly and within a few minutes I could distinguish Budi and Eka and Chuan, could see the colour of the bandanas they had tied around their heads, the number 76 on the hem of Chuan’s shorts that swished loosely around his knees. In just a while I knew I would have to retreat into the shade of the trees; the sun was already uncomfortably hot on my bare arms. Maybe Chuan was right – I was not suited to the outdoors; my body was too weak.

I sat under the trees watching the three men clear the long grass, and when it was all cut down the orchard looked bigger and more forlorn than before. Then they came and sat under the trees with me, surveying what they had achieved and sizing up what they had left to do. I handed them bottles of water that I’d carried with me in an old rucksack, the only task I’d been trusted with. Chuan threw his head back and poured the water into his open mouth without touching the bottle with his lips, and I could see his Adam’s apple moving up and down. Some of the water flowed down his cheeks and throat and onto his T-shirt but he didn’t mind, he was already soaked with sweat. Fuck, he said as he leaned back against the base of a tree trunk, but otherwise no one spoke. They had worked for nearly three hours and although the land was now clear of the thigh-high weeds that had obscured it before, the scale of their task was made clear. They had to cut down every small tree growing on the land, dig up the soil and prepare it to receive new plants.

‘Come on, let’s do it,’ Chuan said, but he didn’t move for another minute or two. Budi and Eka led the way and Chuan went out with them and pointed them to various parts of the plantation. Almost simultaneously, they started their chainsaws and I watched them methodically cut down one young tree after another, the tops of each one trembling in the moments before it toppled over. I could tell by the growl of the chainsaws whenever one of the men was encountering difficulties, slowed down by a stubborn tree. Occasionally I’d hear Chuan swear in Cantonese, or someone else call out to the others with instructions I couldn’t discern over the noise. Sitting in the shade, I felt irrelevant, but what could I do to help them? I could see that even their bodies, lean and agile and powerful, would be defeated by this farm. There were so many trees, so many obstacles. Even after they had worked a whole hour, the field looked unchanged. They were helpless against this land, and their helplessness made me feel even more powerless.

Back in the hangar, Chuan said I could help clean the machines; he showed me how to use an oil-soaked cloth to wipe the blades clean of the grass and leaves and splinters. There wasn’t a hurry, I could do it at my leisure. Budi and Eka were washing themselves, scooping out water with a plastic bucket from a large earthenware pot filled with water. When they finished they rinsed their T-shirts in the bucket and wrung them hard before tying them around their necks and setting off on their scooters. The damp cloth would keep their necks cool and the sun off their backs. I didn’t know where they were going – some hostel nearby where they lived with other Indonesian workers, Chuan said.

I worked while Chuan cleaned himself up. He made a sound when he emptied the first bucket of water over his head, a low moan of relief or pain. He doused himself with water, one bucket after another, as methodically and rhythmically as he had worked the chainsaw earlier. He had a bar of soap that he used to lather his torso and calves, then he reached inside his shorts and scrubbed his crotch with one hand, patiently but vigorously. I felt myself blush. I wasn’t embarrassed, I had seen other boys and men naked, at the municipal pool and in the locker room, so why was I blushing?

I continued to clean the blades of a strimmer that I had laid out on a stone bench in front of me. The metal was blackened from years of use, layered with grease and smooth to the touch. I drew my fingertips lightly over the cutting edge and felt the imperfections.

The sound of splashing water stopped and when I looked up, Chuan had just stepped out of his wet shorts and was in the process of putting on a clean, dry pair. The skin on his buttocks was lighter than on his torso.

‘Careful, you might cut yourself,’ Chuan said, towelling his hair as he walked towards me. He stood for a while, watching me concentrating on what I was doing. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Really good.’

When I looked up at him I noticed that his belly button was pronounced, protruding from his flat stomach. A tiny, tightly curled flower bud.

*

At dinner that evening, the family sat at the round table in the kitchen. It wasn’t very stable, even after Fong had wedged a small piece of wood under one of its feet to make it more balanced. It was one of those fold-up tables you found in street restaurants, topped with a thin plastic veneer made to look like pale green marble. The whole table felt as though it might collapse at any moment.

My mother and Yin had prepared a big bowl of soup made from pork ribs, lotus root and peanuts. My father wanted us to ingest nutrition in liquid form at every meal. You don’t need all the extra bulk from meat and rice in your stomach, he always said. It was the reason he was still so slim, even at his age. His enthusiasm made me hate soup, and I had to pretend to sip at it whenever we gathered at the table. My mother had also prepared some stir-fried bitter gourds with a chilli paste of some kind that Fong had found in the market when my mother had sent him with a shopping list; some small fried fish full of bones; and two or three dishes made from tofu. It was as though she had gone out of her way to cook things that she knew I didn’t like.

‘This is what we ate when we were small, growing up on farms,’ she explained, anticipating any complaints.

‘Peasant food is actually very good for you,’ my father said, lifting small spoonfuls of soup into his mouth.

Fong lifted the bowl to his mouth and slurped. ‘This is fit for emperors of China.’

My father glanced at Fong but said nothing.

Lina was standing by the sink, spreading slices of bread with the jam we’d had for breakfast. She made a triple-layered sandwich and took it outside to the veranda to eat on her own. I could hear Chuan moving upstairs in the bedroom that we now shared, just above the kitchen.

‘How was your day working with the men?’ my father asked. He scooped the soup with such elegance that sometimes I thought he was putting on a performance. I never saw anyone else do that with soup.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Did you learn anything useful?’

‘Yeah. Guess so.’ The day had not been anything remarkable, but somehow I suddenly felt I had to protect it from my father, to shield it from his interrogation.

‘Tell us what you did.’

‘Stuff. Nothing special.’

‘You mean nothing.’

‘They were clearing that small plot of land,’ Fong explained. ‘You know, the one just before the first of the tamarind trees, on the near side of the lake. There’s a lot to do, cutting back the undergrowth, the small trees. I can’t do that kind of thing these days – my back hurts!’

‘Hmm.’ My father considered this information for a moment. ‘But what exactly did you do?’

‘He was mainly working with the strimming machines, cutting grass. Saved us a lot of time,’ Chuan said as he came into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He sounded so breezy and casual that no one could have known he was lying. He looked inside it quickly but then closed it again. It was full of vegetables and meat that my mother had asked Fong to buy from the market – nothing that Chuan could snack on. ‘The kid worked a lot. The chainsaws were a bit tricky for him but they take a while to get used to.’

Without thinking, my father looked at my legs for proof of my labour. I hadn’t realised it but I’d been grazed in places where I’d brushed past stumps of wood hidden in the undergrowth, or when I tripped and fell.

‘Listen to him, talking as if he’s some big boss,’ Fong laughed. ‘Who are you calling a kid, when you’re just a kid yourself?’

My mother stood up and reached for the half-empty bowl of soup to refill it from the pot on the stove. ‘Like father, like son – you’re still just a kid too.’

My mother was right: there was something childlike about Fong’s face when he smiled, despite the deep lines that formed across his forehead and around his eyes.

Chuan filled a glass of water from the tap and drank it in one quick gulp. ‘You’re not eating anything?’ I nudged the spare plastic stool with my foot, an invitation for him to sit next to me.

‘I’m going out.’

‘Eat something before you go,’ my mother said, filling a bowl with soup and setting it down on the table in front of the seat that should have been his.

He was already on his way out. ‘I’ll get something with my friends in town.’

Fong let out a theatrical sigh as he lifted a fresh bowl of soup to his lips. ‘No idea who these friends are.’

Chuan’s scooter started up in the yard outside, its tinny roar cutting through the night as he accelerated away. The road would be unlit all the way until he reached town.

Here they are at last, the old white Volvo drawing to a halt across the yard from the house. As Fong walks down to meet the family, the car doors swing open, all four of them almost simultaneously, as if sprung by an automatic switch, and almost instantly the children step out – a burst of laughter and limbs. They are all talking at the same time, each trying to be louder than the other, and the brightness of their voices is alien, ringing out across the yard and carrying over the trees; too loud for the farm, which is normally silent after mid-afternoon, once the men have finished their work. Fong realises he is frowning; he must un-crease the furrows in his brow and relax his face into a smile. Why is he so unsettled by the noise they’re making? Does this mean that this place – his home – is normally melancholy, and that time has drained all of the farm’s vitality? All of his vitality? That must be the case. The sudden appearance of life has made him feel lifeless.

Jack gets out of the car and raises his hand in greeting, a flutter of the hand before he struggles to open the boot, but the catch is stuck and it won’t open. Why doesn’t he buy himself a new car with all that money? He drove the same car here nearly ten years ago, and even then it wasn’t new. Jack looks at Fong, scowling. He resents having to ask Fong for help, especially in front of his children; he is too proud, but at the same time he knows that he needs him. One of the children comes round to help her father. She must be the eldest, Fong thinks. She leans on the top of the boot with her elbow, pushes the catch hard and suddenly it pops open. She wipes her hands on her shorts and looks at her father, as if expecting praise, though none comes. Immediately, she begins to unload the car, launching into action to get over her disappointment, which was so brief she didn’t even experience it as such, Fong thinks; she is accustomed to this lack of acknowledgement. No one else would recognise this apart from Fong, because he has experienced it so often in his life. What she hasn’t yet realised, Fong thinks, is that the more she hides her hurt at being overlooked, the more people will ignore her. He wishes he could tell her that, but knows it is impossible. Instead he says, ‘Hello, wah long drive, you must be tired.’ Jack turns and shrugs. ‘Heavy traffic – holiday season, isn’t it?’

The girl is no longer a child. Her sister looks younger; Fong knows she is the same age as his own son. She is poised on the edge of adulthood but hasn’t yet taken the plunge like her sister. She is slighter, too, her greater hesitancy of movement giving her the elegance of youth. Her delicacy is a question mark: is she clinging onto adolescence too long, or has her sister grown up too quickly? She reminds him of her mother when she was that age. Only the boy, wandering off towards the trees, is still a child; a frail version of Jack, with the same hair, same eyes, same gait, same detachment.

Like him, they are all older now; but while they are preparing for the years ahead of them, Fong has stagnated, which is strange, he thinks, because his body is constantly moving on the farm. It is as though the more he works, the less he evolves. Soon the only change will be a decline, already anticipated by the changing nature of the pain he experiences these days, no longer those brief bouts of acute agony caused by a dislocated shoulder or broken wrist, but milder, lingering problems – the sore back that faded away only to return permanently, the sprained foot that still hurts three or four months after the fall. The last time they visited, Fong tried to help the boy tie his shoelaces until his father stepped in, the child’s tiny porcelain-light fingers fumbling. Now the boy is holding a little game with both hands as he walks, his fingers moving with such dexterity that they appear to Fong as a blur, a trick of the late-afternoon light. He wonders what they will both be like in ten years’ time.

Ten years. Jack will be nearly seventy then, but no doubt still trim and light on his feet. Ironic, given that he has spent all his life working at a desk while Fong’s days of physical work on the farm have slowed him down. It’s true, Jack’s hair is noticeably flecked with grey now, which suits him. Fong had always thought of him as an old man in a young man’s body, and now, at last, he seems to have grown into the real Jack.

‘Fong, you look healthy – put on some weight?’ Jack says, handing him a suitcase to carry up to the house. ‘Life on the farm must be very prosperous.’ They laugh, not because it’s funny and not out of obligation, but because they know it’s untrue.

Watching the children run up to the house, their brightly coloured backpacks slung over one shoulder, Fong wonders how quickly their excitement will turn to boredom. The novelty of the countryside will wear off. When they were children, there had been more to do – catching fish in the lake, trying to surprise basking monitor lizards on the edge of the stream and pretending they were dinosaurs; he’d even taken his rifle out one day to shoot at the squirrels that were preying on the papaya trees, an activity he’d assumed the children would find thrilling, but that had caused them all to cry and refuse to leave their room for a whole day. He’d bribed them with sweets and chocolate he’d bought from Izhan’s little convenience store in Lok Heng, bought their forgiveness with gifts. Despite their age, they would have understood the transactional nature of his offering; they were Jack’s children after all, he would already have taught them the nature of give and take, that every sorrow could be compensated for. The equations were simpler then, when all of them had been younger.

Fong lifts the final pieces of luggage out of the car and closes the boot. He knows there is someone in the passenger seat of the car – Jack’s wife. As he bends down to lift up a raffia bag, he catches her eye in the rear-view mirror, though she was not looking at him but instead leaning in close to the mirror to wipe something from the edge of her eye – a speck of dust, an irritation. She is still frowning when she steps out of the car and sees him, and he realises that he is unconsciously reflecting her frown with one of his own.

‘Sui,’ he says. ‘Long time.’

She shields her brow from the sun with one hand and the shadow it casts over her face makes it impossible for Fong to discern whether she is smiling or grimacing. ‘I’m really hungry,’ she says. ‘Is there any food?’

The day begins. The clash and boom of crates and tools on the concrete floor. The sweat on the men’s bodies, even at that hour. The fluorescent strip lights hung from the metal rafters that are too bright but still, somehow, not bright enough for Jay to see clearly what he’s doing. And then they venture into the trees, their headlamps casting a pool of light into the dark, the long grass flecked with dew that would burn off with the first of the morning sun. Where did that dampness come from? The drought has lasted for so long now that it is impossible for Jay to imagine the source of the humidity.

Sometimes they surprise animals crossing the track in front of them – wild boar, large jungle cats or deer that emerge from the undergrowth and slip across the path and suddenly freeze in the glare of the headlamps. Jay is reminded of chemistry class, how viscous matter congeals instantly upon contact with another substance. Humans and animals stare at each other, and in that moment I am not sure which of them is more startled.

Sui watches Fong walk up to the house carrying the bags, one of the kids’ satchels slung over his shoulder, her own suitcase in his right hand, a basket of food in the other. She notices that he has a slight limp as he crosses the yard, or maybe it’s just the luggage. When he climbs the stairs ahead of her, he seems heavier on his feet than she remembers, labouring up each step. She tells herself that time distorts memory, that everyone has a vision of their past selves that is prettier than the reality of their present lives. When we imagine what we were like five, ten, twenty years ago, we always see someone fitter, braver, sharper, more beautiful than we actually were. She knows that she has a habit of romanticising the past, even though she has little reason to. Maybe it is precisely because of this that she has developed a tendency to imagine a rosier version of her personal history, in which the people around her become better versions of themselves, their flaws and weaknesses falling away.

Perhaps Fong has always had a slight limp, and she has simply forgotten; maybe he isn’t cheery and uncomplicated, the opposite of her brooding, unpredictable husband, against whom she measures all men. The truth is that she has only met Fong on a handful of occasions. If she were to count the number of days they have spent in each other’s company it might not even add up to a month. But when has longevity ever been the basis for truly knowing someone? Sometimes you meet a person and it doesn’t just feel as if you understand them: you do understand them. The opposite situation proves the rule: even though she’s been married to Jack for twenty years, she feels that she really doesn’t know him at all. She can’t anticipate his moods, is still never sure if he will come back from work so buoyant and optimistic that he talks over her and the children as if they have said nothing, or sit through dinner in silence. What he does when he isn’t at home – where he goes, who he sees – no longer concerns her.

How are you feeling, she asks Fong. She is still curious to know about the illness he suffered the previous year – or was it the year before? The dates have become scrambled in her head.

How am I feeling about what? he says, smiling as he sets down the bags neatly in the corner of the room. The sheets on the bed smell of detergent and sunshine, so crisp and flawless that she’s afraid to set her handbag down, and instead clutches it awkwardly.

I heard you were sick last year. Was it serious?

No. He shrugs. Not really.

What was it? The illness, I mean.

I don’t know. I fell and hurt my leg, they had to do a small operation, then something went wrong and I stayed in hospital for a while, then when I came home, I was very tired, too tired to work, so I was in bed for some time. But I’m fine now.

A while, some time – how long? Sui hears her own annoyance.

You know me, I never remember things like that! He responds with forced cheeriness, but his brow is furrowed, and she can see that he is trying to remember the details of the illness, and failing. She can imagine him in the ward of the local hospital or even in the provincial capital if the problem was serious, doctors at his side trying to explain the intricacies of his operation, why they were performing it, the nature of the complications that had arisen, providing him with analyses of his blood tests, the possible diagnoses and various remedies – all of which would have passed over him. He would have heard only unfamiliar words and phrases, complicated medical terms that meant nothing to him. He had no history of ailments – or none that he was aware of, anyway – no body of vocabulary that he could rely upon to interrogate the doctors. He is not interested in his health, or his body, and this frustrates Sui.

The thought of him stretched out on the hospital bed in an airless ward, dozing uncomfortably, ignorant of the sickness that keeps him there, makes her think of Jack – that comparison again, she must stop that! – and the way he articulates each minuscule symptom each time he feels unwell, methodically eliminating each possible illness until he arrives at a likely explanation, which he confirms with a swift visit to the doctor, who rarely proves him wrong.

‘I know my body better than any physician,’ he once said, which Sui found amusing at the time. She had just ceased to be his student, but still held the pupil’s fascination for the teacher’s grand statements, even when she knew they were wild exaggerations – and perhaps admired precisely because she knew they were untrue. He’d caught a chill once, after an evening in Lumut, where they’d stopped off on their way back from seeing her family. It was meant to have been a quick break to have dinner before continuing back to KL, but the road had taken them along a beach where the water seemed clean and calm, and they’d stepped out for some fresh air. Let’s swim, Jack said, and stripped off to his underpants before plunging into the water. She’d watched him from the shore, smiling as he splashed water towards her like a child vying for his mother’s attention. It was almost dark when he got out, and he had nothing to dry himself with. By the next morning he was shivery and coughing with what they both assumed was a cold, and the following day he said, ‘I have pneumonia.’ Their doctor confirmed this almost immediately and had him admitted to hospital. ‘See? I was right,’ he said when she brought him a box of Brand’s Essence of Chicken and some tangerines. ‘I can feel every tiny change inside me,’ he said, smoothing his chest with one hand. It was as if all his sensitivity to life was channelled inwards, with none left for anyone else.

‘I’ve prepared some food,’ Fong says. ‘I knew you’d be hungry. You’re always hungry.’

Sui smiles. His impressions of her are two decades old, when she had a different metabolism; when she was an entirely different person. How beautiful it is to come up against this image of yourself, preserved by someone else and offered to you now as the truth. The lean, ravenous version of her twenty-year-old self was not as happy as he thinks. Still, she tries to figure out what his illness really involved: a broken ankle, a gash, an operation, complications, septicaemia, antibiotics.

‘Yes, let’s get some food,’ she says, but then realises she is standing between him and the door.

She can hear Jack downstairs, hauling the last of the bags into the house and dropping them on the floor with a heavy thump.

I learned to harvest the different kinds of fruit – rambutan, papaya, star fruit, dragon fruit. After a few days it was easy to spot the fruit hidden among the leaves and release it with one swift cut of the knife. That was the key, to be quick; as Chuan said, ‘You have to be fast but gentle, because the fruit is fragile; you can’t just dump it into the baskets, you have to place it in slowly.’ We had to get it done before the sun got too hot, and also before the others left for other jobs. Budi and Eka worked at a factory nearby, canning pineapple, and they needed to get there by ten o’clock. Chuan was juggling his shifts at the 7-Eleven, and if we finished early he could have a couple of hours’ rest before riding into town to start his shift. It wasn’t much of a job, he knew, but still it was proper employment that paid him a small salary. He didn’t have to add unlike on the farm; I already understood that.

There wasn’t much to do anyway. The long dry spell had made the trees sickly and weak, and the fruit was small and sparse and often spoiled. ‘It’s no use,’ Chuan said one day when we were working on our own. He held up a bunch of rambutan that he’d just cut from the tree, blackened and small, prematurely withered by the drought. ‘No one’s going to pay anything for that.’ He tossed them into a basket along with the other fruit we’d picked that day. A thin cloud of fruit flies rose from the pile; what we had just harvested had already begun to rot. I carried on, but Chuan started to walk back to the hangar. ‘You’re wasting your time!’ he shouted without turning around. In the relative shade of the orchard I could work at my own pace, and I had an excuse to be away from the house. I didn’t feel like going back and explaining to my father why I had stopped work for the day, so I carried on with what I was doing. When I finished, I dragged the baskets back to the hangar and arranged the fruit in the crates. It was like playing a child’s game, where all I had to do was slot one shape next to another so that everything fitted. I made patterns composed of different shapes and colours. I picked out all the misshapen and half-rotten fruit and built pyramids until the tops of the triangles toppled over. What did it matter? All of it, good and bad, would just be thrown out anyway.

By the time I got back to the house it was a long time after lunch and no one else was around. The afternoon was slowly dissolving into the heat and I was glad to be alone.

It was the same the next day, and the one after. Budi and Eka didn’t turn up; they were stuck at the factory. Chuan was doing long shifts at the 7-Eleven and was spending his nights away from home. I was starting to get used to the solitude of the day, away from the house and its inhabitants. I continued harvesting whatever fruit I could find, beginning to make sense of the land, to figure out how each small orchard was separated from the next by patches of grass and shrubs that were threatening to overwhelm the fruit trees. The paths that crisscrossed the farm were shrouded by the long grass that made it difficult to navigate; but they were still there, waiting to be explored. Occasionally I would hear the distant rattle of a car starting up and would recognise our old Volvo pulling out of the yard, onto the dirt track that led away from the farm. If I was close enough, I’d see my father alone in the car, gripping the steering wheel, craning his neck forward as if he were being pulled along by an invisible force. I saw Lina cycling down the track on an old bicycle she’d found in a shed behind the house; I heard my mother call for Yin once or twice, her voice surprisingly bright and clear all the way from the yard. But otherwise I was alone until the evening, when we each drifted into the house around dinnertime, ate a little – sometimes together, sometimes not – before retiring to our respective rooms. In the hot, still air of the countryside, we no longer felt the need to be together.

In my room on those long evenings, watching the moths flutter desperately against the single bulb that hung above me, I’d wonder what Chuan was doing after the night shift. I tried to picture his life, the friends he was with; whether he was with Jessie, the woman we’d met when we drove into town. I thought about the kind of bed he might be sleeping in – small, steel-framed, with a simple mattress that was more comfortable than any of the ones at home. That was why he preferred to spend nights away. Maybe he had a room of his own; much better than sharing one with someone he barely knew.

I had some books with me that I’d brought from home, things I was supposed to read before school – history, geography, a book on mathematics that my father had selected, and two novels that were meant to improve my English. Each time I opened one at random, I found it impossible to concentrate. The light was too dim, there was no air, and every noise was magnified. Through the flimsy walls I could hear my sisters stifling giggles and my father coughing theatrically to let us know that he was still awake, and that we should be asleep. A lone dog barked in the distance, two uncertain growling barks punctuated by a pause, followed by shorter, sharper yapping, as if communicating in Morse code. It started each night when I was just beginning to reach for the switch to turn the light out; and each time I stopped, thinking that the dog had been startled by Chuan’s return, but it was never the case.

*

I was hauling a basketful of fruit into the hangar when Chuan pulled up on his motorbike. I hadn’t seen him for three days. ‘What the hell is this?’ he said when he saw the crates of fruit I’d packed and arranged neatly.

‘Fruit,’ I said. ‘What else does it look like?’

He walked around the stacked crates and lifted one or two. ‘You did all this?’

I nodded. ‘I didn’t have anything else to do.’

‘Weren’t you studying? All those books in your room.’

‘It’s your room. When are you next going to use it?’

He picked up a star fruit and lifted it as if preparing to hurl it at me. Then he placed it back into its crate and said, ‘I think we can get some money for this.’

‘You’re crazy,’ I said but started to help him load the crates onto the lorry. I wanted to drive into town with him. It was still early and we’d have all day away from the farm.

‘We need to hurry,’ he said, checking the time. How different his days were from mine, I thought, how relentless. He was constantly moving from one task to the next, one place to another. He had just finished a long shift and now he was already off; he returned just to go out again. My days on the farm were empty, but so too, I realised then, were my days back in the city. School, sports, evenings at home – it was all just time waiting to elapse. The more I wanted time to pass, the longer it stretched out for me. I wondered if Chuan ever wished for the opposite of what he had. I wondered if he wanted time to slow down, as it did for me.

We went to a place in town where people gathered to sell produce, mainly fruit and vegetables, or fish caught from the river. The offerings were meagre, laid out on mats on the ground. It was barely a market, just a cluster of people and cars, but that was common these days, Chuan said. People needed money so they sold whatever they had to earn some extra cash, and you could buy things here much more cheaply than at the main market – that’s why there were always people here.

‘Look at that,’ I said, pointing at a small, mud-coloured carp. A long white worm had emerged from its mouth and was easing its way across the glossy marble of the fish’s eye. I watched it trickle slowly into the gills, and wondered how much of it was still coiled inside the fish’s guts, or maybe its brains. Did fish have brains? I should have known that from biology lessons but had forgotten. I’d read somewhere that worms were a part of our bodies; virtually all living species harboured them. I remembered the first time I discovered a tapeworm emerging from my own bowels, that strange sensation of my entrails or some vital part of my insides being painfully squeezed out and later, observing it writhing and coiling in the mess of the toilet, the revulsion at having harboured such a thing within me without ever knowing about it. The fish was dead but the worm that it had carried was still alive. I imagined a big white worm inside me, waiting for the right moment to emerge and slither across my eye. I looked for Chuan but he was way ahead of me, setting out the first of the crates on the ground, next to an old man selling bunches of wilted vegetables.

We sold what we could, which turned out to be most of what we’d brought with us, and emptied the rest onto a pile of already-decomposing fruit in a ditch nearby, the remains of the day’s unsold produce. A dog and two cats were treading gingerly around the pile, sniffing carefully. In usual times the rain at the end of the year would have come cascading down the drain and swept the waste into the river beyond. Now it was rotting in the heat. The smell of decay was sweet and slightly intoxicating.

‘Your fruit was very popular,’ Chuan said, grinning as he counted out the money.

‘It’s not mine, it’s yours.’

‘Doesn’t matter whose it is,’ he said, holding up the notes. It didn’t look like very much. ‘This is what counts.’

We walked towards the intersection of the two main streets where the busiest shops were. With a quick flick of his hand he pointed out the 7-Eleven where he worked, tucked between a Muslim pawn shop and a bank. As we walked, he waved at people he knew. We went to the same Chinese grocery store we had stopped at before, which Chuan said was the cheapest place in town to buy beer, and which also sold cigarettes cheaply because the owner had a brother who smuggled them in from Thailand. He had to be careful with money at the moment because he’d just made a down payment on a room in town that he’d seen, which wasn’t so expensive but still, he’d need to buy a bed and a small fridge and that sort of thing.

‘When will you move?’

He shrugged. ‘Not sure. Maybe next month.’

‘That soon?’ I said, sounding more alarmed that I intended to.

‘New year, new life,’ he said as he opened the door of one of the chiller cabinets. ‘Why do you care? You’ll be long gone. Back to your normal life.’

He bought two cans of beer and a packet of cigarettes for himself and a bottle of Coke without asking me what I wanted. We crossed the road and sat on a crude wooden platform under the broad canopy of some old trees, next to a few motorbike riders who were taking a break. I felt the men watching us, but Chuan didn’t seem to notice.

‘Will your dad be all right when you move out?’ I asked. ‘He’ll be all alone on the farm.’ From within the deep shade of the trees, the streets appeared almost white in the sun. It was in that quiet time just after lunch, when people had returned to work or, like us, were sheltering from the heat.

‘How should I know?’ Chuan mumbled. He threw back his head to take a long gulp of beer and I looked at the ridges on his neck contracting and loosening; contracting, loosening. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and passed me the can. I took a small sip and tried not to grimace at the surprising bitterness. He laughed. ‘You’ll get used to it.’ I took another, longer swig and wiped my mouth the way he did. He lit a cigarette, took a drag and handed it to me. I held it between thumb and forefinger the way he did and inhaled slowly, feeling the pleasant burn in my throat, all the way down to my chest. I held my breath and imagined the smoke in my lungs. How long would I be able to hold it in, I wondered. A flock of crows stirred in the trees above us, a soft ruffle of wings that rippled through the branches before falling to a hush, like a wave settling on sand.

‘Look,’ he said, pointing at someone cycling against the flow of traffic, on the wrong side of the road closest to us. It was Lina, wearing a red baseball cap back to front as she often did, to protect her neck from the sun. She had already passed when Chuan called out to her; she had wraparound sunglasses with silvery-blue lenses that glinted in the light when she turned to look in our direction. She stopped abruptly, balancing the bike with one foot on the ground, ignoring the beeping of oncoming scooters. She lifted her sunglasses and squinted as her eyes searched for us in the shade, and then walked the bike in our direction.

As she left the glare of the street and entered the pool of shade cast by the trees, I felt a sudden urge to shout for her to leave, to leave us alone. Instead I said, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘What are you doing here?’ She turned her cap so it was facing forward once more and perched her sunglasses on the brim. ‘Parents keep asking where you are. I said I saw you working in the fields somewhere.’

Chuan opened the second can of beer and handed it to her. She nodded in thanks and took a big mouthful. ‘Ugh,’ she grimaced. ‘Warm Carlsberg. The worst.’ But she continued to drink, and as she did, eyed the cigarette I was holding. ‘If the parents found out, you’d be dead.’

‘No I wouldn’t. I’d just be like you.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Excommunicated.’

‘I wish.’

Chuan handed her the packet of cigarettes and when she reached out for it, he saw the tattoo that she’d had done earlier that year. A dove hovering over the Chinese character for ‘jade’.

‘That’s your name, isn’t it?’ Chuan said.

The cigarette trembled between her lips as she lit it, nodding. When, on her first vacation back home, my father had banned her from smoking in the garden, she smoked just outside the house and left the entrance to the garage littered with cigarette butts crushed into the tarmac. It was public land, she said, so she could do what she wanted. On her next trip home she revealed a new passion for Malay rock bands, which she would play as loudly as she could. When my father shouted for it to stop, she would replace it with the Indigo Girls, singing along and imitating a fake American accent.

‘Remember your last visit to the farm?’ Chuan said. ‘You fell into the lake and nearly drowned. Your parents were furious and I got the blame. When you left, my dad hit me so hard I ran away and hid for two days.’

‘Serves you right,’ Lina said, crunching the empty can of beer and handing it back to Chuan. ‘You tried to push me in.’

‘I didn’t – we were just playing and you fell.’

‘I really can’t remember anything from back then,’ Lina said. ‘We were just kids. It’s not my fault your dad’s an asshole. Maybe that’s why he gets along with mine.’ She put on her sunglasses and rearranged her cap.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

‘This piece of shit could do with some new tyres,’ she replied, holding the bicycle by its handlebars. ‘The chain is a bit rusty, the pedal needs tightening. I’m trying to find a repair shop somewhere.’

‘Go talk to the mechanic at the garage next to the phone store on that street,’ Chuan said. ‘He’s into bikes, he can help you. I can come, if you want.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ Lina said, starting to wheel the bike away. She turned and stared at us, but from behind her shades it was difficult to tell what her expression was. I think she was smiling. ‘I’ll leave you boys to do whatever you were doing.’

‘You owe me one,’ Chuan called out as she walked away. Without turning, she lifted her arm with her middle finger showing.

He laughed. ‘She’s cool, your sister.’

Only four years separated me and Lina but she had always belonged to a separate universe, if not that of adults, then one of her own making, detached from mine. I couldn’t remember us playing together as children, or else it had happened so rarely that it was irrelevant to our growing up. She was not someone who often lost her temper, but the other kids in the neighbourhood still kept their distance. Don’t mess with her – that was the reputation she had. I didn’t know if that made her cool or not.

‘Let’s go find Jessie,’ Chuan said, dusting off the seat of his shorts and tossing the beer can into the bushes. ‘She’ll be finishing work soon.’

We headed to a hair salon called B’Friendz, which had a silver-painted front that we could see from down the road. Jessie had a job there shampooing the customers’ hair and sweeping the floors – a temporary job while she waited for something better, Chuan told me. It seemed everyone was waiting for something better. From across the street we saw her sitting on the concrete steps outside the shop, smoking a cigarette and texting on her phone. Business was slow, it transpired, and she had finished a bit early and was wondering what to do. She wanted to go to the cinema in the new mall that had recently been built. I’d seen it earlier, a small two-storey block tucked in between two rows of shops, in a space that used to be a car park. There was a new American movie she wanted to see, G.I. Jane. Or the one about male strippers, but maybe we shouldn’t bother, she said – the censors would surely have cut all the scenes with naked men, and what was the point of seeing a film like that if you couldn’t see naked men? When she and Chuan laughed, I was aware that I was blushing.

‘What? You don’t like to see naked men?’ she said, her expression suddenly changing, becoming serious. Her question hung in the air as she waited for a reply. Then she broke into a joyous, exaggerated laugh, the same kind as the comic actors on variety shows on TV, a sudden explosion of colour in that hot, drab street. ‘Joking! Don’t look so scared.’ Sai lo, sai lo. Like everyone else, she used the same Cantonese word every time she addressed me.

Chuan was laughing too, though less expansively than Jessie – more like a suppressed chuckle.

‘Don’t tease him,’ Chuan said. ‘He’s not used to girls like you.’

‘What does that mean?’ Jessie shot back, clearing her hair away from her temples with one finger. Her nails were painted a dark purple and she’d had fresh highlights in her fringe since I’d last seen her, dark gold streaks that fell across her forehead.

The beer had gone to my head and I felt dizzy.

‘He’s a nice boy from the city,’ Chuan said, switching to Mandarin, speaking in a funny voice that was meant to sound formal. ‘He’s not used to our kind of humour.’

We walked to the mall and Jessie was telling Chuan about news of friends of theirs, all of whom seemed to be girls. A-Hsiao fell off her scooter and broke a tooth; Rina found a human tooth in the coleslaw she bought from KFC; Manju was sick after having too many blue slushies from the new café in the mall. Who were all these people? I looked at Chuan to discern any trace of worry or concern that would betray a more intimate relationship with one of them, but could see nothing.

The air in the mall smelled stale and slightly sour and we knew the air-conditioning wasn’t working. Maybe it was the beer, the cigarettes, or the heat, but I felt sick. Bright, colourful spots appeared before me as I tried to keep up with Chuan and Jessie. Sai lo. What the hell are you doing here, kid? I could taste the bitterness of the beer at the back of my throat, and felt a sudden and overwhelming urge to vomit. In the middle of the space between the stores there was a square stone block filled with palm trees and other leafy plants. They looked recently planted, lushly green and glossy, maybe even plastic. I rushed over to it and threw up at the base of the plants, watching the froth seep into the soil. I sank to the floor, my back propped up against the concrete block. But even that felt like too much of an effort, and I slowly eased myself down onto the floor, which was cool and hard. Overhead there was a pane of glass high above the plants; the sky contained in a neat square. The tips of some of the plants were curling towards the sun, yet turning brown with rot. How wonderful that something could be simultaneously dying and striving to stay alive. The light was too bright and I had to close my eyes.

*

There were trees there too. This place offers respite, not just to me but to others like me.

I am at the far end of the sports fields, shielded from the main school building by a low row of concrete store-rooms full of broken tables and chairs, metal poles and faded flags once used in ceremonies to mark Independence Day, but the teachers no longer have the energy to organise parades these days and we, the pupils, are only too glad to be relieved of yet another obligation. Our lives are full of duty, we don’t want any more of it, so these totems of nationhood now sit sadly in storage. Maybe we will celebrate the arrival of the millennium, but by then I will no longer be here.

It is late, the school gates are closed and we are not meant to hang around. There’s nothing to steal, nothing worth destroying or disfiguring; everything is possessed of such natural drabness that even the lacklustre graffiti on the outbuildings looks like decoration. No one will find me here in this spot, a clearing straddling a deep drain that always contains stagnant grey water and plastic bags snagged in fallen branches. Remnants of the wire fence lay hidden in the undergrowth beyond, but to most people, this clearing, encircled by thick undergrowth and protected by the deep shade cast by the trees overhead, is a murky place best avoided. Even the tough boys don’t come here, afraid of unknown dangers – robbers, drug addicts and who knows who or what else. It’s true that there are often fresh syringes on the dirt floor here, which I have to kick away into the bushes, and dirty rags and tissues that shine brightly against the black earth. Funnily enough it never reeks of shit, which you would expect it to, but instead smells faintly of damp leaves and cooked food, an odour close to a mild curry, which is neither pleasant or unpleasant, but always makes me think that someone has been here just before me, to snatch a moment or two alone, as I do. Maybe it is the smell of solitude.

This is a place that people escape to, in search of brief respite. In the future, I will find myself in similar spaces, often shaded by trees, by lakes or rivers or among rolling dunes by the sea, or in a park in the middle of a metropolis in the summer, with the light fading, and I will remember this clearing, with its particular scent of loneliness, remember the melancholy that feels like an experience shared by everyone who visits this space and claims it as theirs, so that even when I am alone I will feel connected to others. This enclave, like all the others, is separated from the outside world and its terrors by the faintest of boundaries, in this case the row of small store-rooms and a thicket of trees. In times to come, in places I’ve yet to discover, the barrier between peace and brutality might be a railway track, a gulley, a rocky outcrop, low railings and a gate that is locked at night, a barrier that isn’t truly a barrier; for once inside the haven, I will still be able to hear all the noise from the world beyond – the roar of traffic, mothers cajoling their children, couples arguing, groups of drunk men singing, the howl of ambulances and police cars – and realise that nothing, in truth, separates me from the madness outside; yet once I am within the boundary I feel protected, as if, strange as this sounds, I belong to it. Maybe it is the smell of safety.

I found this place by accident, during obligatory after-school sports – a football game that I was observing from the sidelines. Team sports were the most confusing part of school for me, and football was the activity I dreaded the most. I panicked every time I saw the ball rolling towards me, trying not to recoil in terror, as though it carried with it some kind of contagious disease. What should I do with this strange thing now at my feet? At home I tried to practise kicking it so that I wouldn’t appear so awkward at school, but I couldn’t figure out why I was doing it. It rolled in such an arbitrary way, didn’t do what
I wanted it to. On the field, the teacher and the other boys would shout incomprehensible things at me. Pass. Look behind you. Jump. Run faster. Play harder. Hit it. Instructions that my body didn’t understand. And then, when I couldn’t perform what was asked of me, the insults, always the insults, which by now had ceased to be remarkable. There would be grumbles and I would soon be substituted. Often I wasn’t even asked to play, which suited me fine. All I had to do was watch.

On that occasion I was sitting on the grass reading, when the ball rolled past me. The boys on the field cried out. The ball hit a stone and looped into the long grass behind me, bouncing past the store-rooms and into the trees in the distance. The boys yelled at me to go get it. As I stood up and began to trudge over to the trees I heard the boys snigger, and knew they were watching. The ball had vanished into that place that no one wanted, or dared to go into, and balls that ended up there were generally considered lost for good. I would prove my worth to the team, I would retrieve their prized possession. I walked without hesitating beyond the low buildings and when I approached the bushes I noticed narrow gaps in the undergrowth, almost imperceptible to anyone who wasn’t looking out for them. I pushed my way through one and found myself in a clearing, wider and airier than I’d imagined possible – from the outside the trees looked impenetrable. A group of about six or seven boys gathered on the fallen tree trunks at the far end of the clearing, just before it gave way to the ditch. They were the boys who were the targets of the cruellest insults at school – the faggots, femboys, etc, etc – and of the most casual bullying. They weren’t worth the effort of beating up – that would have been too easy for the tough guys – and instead had chewing gum stuck in their hair, were tripped up on the stairs, were spoken to in high-pitched voices, referred to as Miss Hashim or Miss Tan – even by some of our teachers. I avoided them at school and turned my head whenever I saw one of them being shoulder-barged by another boy. I pretended I didn’t hear the insults, laughed so no one would notice me blushing. When I heard one of those words, or someone referring to them as a girl, in a falsetto voice, I felt that they were talking about me.

They looked up when I entered their space. They were sitting cross-legged, straight-backed, styling each other’s hair. In these dead hours after school they had put on make-up. One of them stared at me with eyes lined with blue shadow and fake lashes, and blew me a kiss with purple-glossed lips. There was a tremble of laughter in the group – a cool breeze blowing through the glade. I smiled, but they ignored me and returned to styling their friends’ hair.

I remembered that I was meant to be looking for the football but I couldn’t see it anywhere. From the field, the boys were shouting my name. How strange, I thought: there was now an outside and an inside, and I was glad to be where I was. That instant, for the first time, I felt the urge to be part of a larger group – to be friends with other people. The afternoon sun was falling through gaps in the trees overhead; small circles of white light trembled on the floor of the clearing.

The next day I returned to the clearing at exactly the same time but there was no one there. I waited for the boys I’d seen but no one appeared. After an hour on my own, I, too, felt part of that space.

Since then, this place has become a refuge. It is where I come to spend an hour or two alone before going home. The time calms and fortifies me, prepares me to face my parents and the stony interrogations about how I’m doing at school, and for the arguments between my sister and my father over our daily family dinner that has become a torture. I always come here on my own, I have never revealed my visits here to anyone else, because to do so would be to admit that I am like the other boys who come here – the boys who, the moment school and its rules are over for the day, paint their nails and listen to Mariah Carey – and I don’t yet have their courage.

But today I have broken that rule. I feel not so much brave as reckless. I am here with Nizam, who is in the year above me at school. The details of our friendship up to this point are not important. It is only the present that matters. We are sitting next to each other, on the broad log that the boys were spread out on the very first time I came here, and he is telling me about his family, who live far from the capital, in a small town whose name doesn’t mean anything to me. He says it as if I should know it, as if it is the centre of the universe, and I understand that for him, it is. In the city, he lives in a shared room in a house with some distant relatives, but he doesn’t want to be here. He is doing very badly at school, even worse than I am, failing at everything and can’t wait for this ordeal to be over so that he can go back to his town by the coast, where everyone knows him. He is describing the beach, called Pantai-what? (I’m not paying attention.) He loves going there at sunset, just to be on his own.

You’d like it there, he says, I’ll take you when you come and visit me. Once we are done with school. The sunsets are so clear you can see across to Indonesia sometimes.

You’re making it up, I laugh. The Strait of Malacca is forty miles wide.

I swear you can see everything.

He names the types of fish you can catch just by throwing a line into the water from the jetty. Kerisi, Selasih – the list is long and I don’t recognise any of them. Has he shifted positions, so that his knee is now nudging mine? People don’t know that all of the fish we eat are carnivorous, they only eat other fish and crustaceans. His thigh has pushed against mine, I can feel the heat of it through the thin cotton of my trousers and suddenly I feel my ribcage tighten; I can’t tell if I am breathing too fast or not breathing at all. He is still talking. A grouper can swallow another fish whole – it just opens its mouth and the smaller fish disappears, like water. He spreads his arms to indicate the size of this giant fish, and then one of his hands lands softly on my thigh.

I am just about to move my hand to meet his when I hear voices, a rustle of foliage, then some boys appear – the ones I saw before, whom I’ve been hoping to run into ever since. They pause and look at us, eyebrows raised, but then proceed towards us, taking a seat wherever there is space on the fallen tree trunk that is conveniently broad and low, and worn smooth with time. One of them winks, kisses his hand and blows the kiss in my direction. I wave in return.

Nizam makes a noise, a clicking of his tongue against his teeth to show annoyance, and pulls away from me, slinging his backpack onto his shoulder in one swift movement. He walks away briskly, but I want him to stay and speak to the others. I stand up and try to follow him but by this time he is already past the store-rooms and on the sports field, jogging back towards the school gates.

In the days that follow, he turns his head whenever he sees me, or looks at a spot just above or beyond me in order to avoid eye contact. Am I imagining it or has he changed the way he walks to imitate the boys who play football and listen to heavy metal bands? Like them, he has shaved the sides of his head very short, and turns his head to spit gratuitously while strolling along the walkway to the canteen. Like me, he was always a loner but suddenly he has friends, older boys from the football crowd. One day they are walking down the stairs and I am heading in the opposite direction on my way to class and I think they are going to shoulder-barge me and laugh, which is the usual treatment, but instead I hear an insult, uttered by two of them. I can’t hear the precise arrangement of the words but they contain all three of Cina, babi and bapuk. Chinese pig faggot pig Chinese faggot faggot pig Chinese. I have just reached the top of the stairs and I turn and grab the first one of them I can reach, yanking at his backpack and feeling him lose his balance. In this act I mean to cause him harm. But he pulls back, holds on to the banister and in the ensuing struggle we both fall down the stairs, landing heavily, and it is difficult to say who is hurt the most. He ends up with a cracked rib, I with a broken hand. The next day, as punishment for getting into a fight, I am suspended from school for two weeks. My parents are informed, and I know they will not speak to me for all that time.

Before I leave school that day I walk back to the clearing and of course there is no one there. Maybe I imagined those boys, willed them into existence to keep me company in a world of my creation. For the next two weeks, I will not be allowed to leave the house, and after that I will be forced to return to school, and when I do, I know I shall not come back to this space. Something has changed, but I can’t describe it. There will be a month until the end of term, and when I return after the vacation, nearly two years before I can leave for good. Time is something to be endured; there is too much of it ahead of me. I sit on the log and listen to the silence. Why doesn’t time accelerate and propel you into a new age, when you can emerge a different person – stronger, calmer, more beautiful?

There is no wind, and the leaves on the trees are motionless.

*

‘Hey. He’s all right – thank God. Fuck. It’s your fault, why did you give him beer?’

‘I didn’t know he’d never drunk before.’

‘He’s just a kid.’

‘I was drinking way before his age.’

‘But you’re trash, he’s different.’

‘He’s just the same as us.’

‘Is he really your cousin or are you making that up?’

‘Go get him some water.’

I heard them speak but didn’t open my eyes. It was more comfortable just to stay as I was, lying on my side listening to Chuan and Jessie fuss over me, and strangely reassuring to hear the worry in their voices. I wondered where I was. Someone turned on a light and asked me if I was okay. ‘My head hurts,’ I said, and Chuan went to get me a Panadol and a glass of water that was unpleasantly warm. I was in a small room with a shiny white-tiled floor and fresh paint on the walls. We were at Jessie’s apartment, Chuan told me, in the spare room that they’d fixed up for short-term rental but no one wanted to rent – there was too much supply in town and no demand – so she let him stay there whenever he finished a late shift, so he wouldn’t have to ride all the way back to the farm. There was a small framed poster on the wall opposite me. Chuan had chosen it himself from the supermarket in town that sold pictures in the homeware section. I said it was Van Gogh and Chuan said what the hell is that. I told him it was a painting called Sunflowers and that the original was very expensive, worth tens of millions of dollars.

‘How do you know this stuff?’ he said, looking at the poster as if it had suddenly acquired a new value.

I shrugged. ‘I must have read about it somewhere.’

‘I like the colours,’ he said, staring at the picture.

Jessie checked her watch and stood up to leave. She was seeing a new guy and wanted to time it so that she was late but not too late. At the beginning of a relationship you had to make sure not to seem too interested, otherwise the guy doesn’t make an effort, she said. It was the third or fourth date they’d had and she still hadn’t let him kiss her because she didn’t want him to think she was easy. ‘I’m giving you tips for free,’ she said, looking at me. Then she winked and left, closing the door to the apartment very gently behind her.

Chuan continued to gaze at the poster. Maybe he had noticed something new about it that he hadn’t seen before. He was wearing a white singlet and on his right shoulder he had a fresh scar, barely scabbed over, that looked like a comma. I felt like reaching out to touch it.

‘I’d better take you home,’ he said. ‘Your parents will be worried.’ He took his phone from his pocket and showed me the time: 19:35.

‘We’re both in trouble anyway. Might as well stay here.’

He smiled and patted my leg to encourage me to get up, but I didn’t. He left his hand on my shin for a moment and looked at me. ‘You look like shit,’ he said.

‘I’m fine,’ I said, though I didn’t move because I felt too weak. He took my hand in his and stood up, tugging with theatrical effort but in fact he wasn’t pulling at all. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

I felt shaky on my feet as I walked into the small L-shaped living room. There was a black sofa, too big for the space, covered in textured shiny plastic meant to resemble leather. It looked brand new. Chuan said that Jessie had bought it in a closing-down sale in town, together with a Japanese kettle that not only boiled the water but kept it hot for hours. On the floor there was a TV and a PlayStation with wires trailing across the room. They didn’t have money to buy a table to put it on, Chuan said, and besides, what was the point because they’d both be moving soon.

He went to the refrigerator, got some ice out of the freezer compartment and wrapped it in a thin towel which he twisted to make a tight ball. He asked me to turn around, and I looked out of the window at the darkened town, lit here and there in patches that punctuated the gloom. A streetlamp was flickering, as if it was just about to give out and turn black, but then it glowed bright and steady once again. Chuan pressed the ice pack to my neck, and the shock of the cold made my throat tighten, but when I opened my mouth to gasp, no sound emerged. Somewhere a dog was barking and someone was singing to a karaoke set. I couldn’t hear the music clearly, only the voice. It sounded like a child’s.

After just a few seconds the ice began to melt and thin trails of cold water dripped down my spine and along my shoulder blades. I wasn’t sure if it was the heat of the night or the heat of my skin that was melting the ice. I didn’t want to leave, but after a while Chuan said we really had to go.

He handed me another glass of water and I felt my head beginning to clear.

Fong can’t help but observe the way Sui and Jack behave when they are together, which doesn’t happen so often. Mostly, one of them will find an excuse to be in another space, going outdoors when the other one comes in, or remembering that they left something upstairs as soon as the other comes down, an exchange of places so ritualistic and predictable that it almost seems to be a courtesy. He is standing at the sink, washing the dishes while Sui finishes her breakfast, when Jack comes into the kitchen. Sui stands up at once, though her breakfast of bread and kaya is unfinished. ‘Did you sleep well?’ she asks. ‘I was just going out for a walk before it gets too hot.’ She clears her dish and mug away, offering Jack her chair.

Fong watches her wander past the stream that is now a ditch, tracing the path that runs along the field that is now a thin forest, before stopping in the distance and looking towards the orchards that are still, more or less, orchards. She stands for a while, arms folded, taking in the scenery. Jack emerges from the house carrying his mug of coffee, walking slowly towards her. When he reaches her they stand close together, speaking without looking at each other. He points to a spot in the distance, his arm moving in an arc, describing an area, or maybe an idea – a fantasy, now that the farm no longer exists as they remembered it. Then they become still, their gaze held by the view – which is not really a view, just a mess of foliage. For a moment Fong thinks that one of them might reach out and touch the other, but instead Sui turns and walks back to the house, not briskly but not slowly either. Maybe that’s how married life is. Everyone feels compelled to be together all the time, but in fact it’s the opposite, Fong thinks – perhaps you can only survive if you’re in a separate space. But what does he know? He was married for less than two years.

Teenage sweethearts, early marriage, a baby, one meagre income, the farm already struggling. His wife had high school qualifications, she was able to get a job in Singapore, a temporary separation born of necessity that soon became permanent. How swiftly two lives could become unbonded, though maybe the truth was that they were never that close to begin with. This quick, invisible separation was surely something that Jack had experienced, just as Fong had; it was perhaps the only thing they could claim to have in common.

You can’t call it an orchard if it no longer bears fruit – we agreed on that. So what was this collection of trees – a pre-jungle? Here, when a piece of land that was once a farm is no longer a farm, it is a matter of months before nature reclaims it.

‘Don’t you have anything better to do with your life than think up dumb questions?’ Chuan said, leaning on his shovel, looking up at Lina. He was breathing heavily but his voice was calm, almost flat. He was wearing plastic sunglasses with white frames that made him look like a surfer, especially with the blond highlights.

‘It’s important to call things what they really are,’ Lina replied. ‘Because if this place is no longer a farm, why are you bothering to do this shit?’

Budi and Eka and two other men whose names I didn’t know – they’d just appeared, I guessed they’d been hired for a few days – were digging a shallow trench in the earth, breaking the baked soil with pickaxes and spades, and Chuan and I were shovelling it to one side. We were preparing the ground for a new irrigation system, though Chuan said it was pointless. The trees were failing – most of them were sick, not just from the drought, but from the years of neglect. All through his childhood he hadn’t been able to see it, he told me; whenever he witnessed Fong struggling with a bad harvest or a plague of insects he thought it was normal, it was just part of life as a farmer. It wasn’t until he was older that he realised it was a simple question of finances: his father struggled because he couldn’t afford fertiliser or insecticide or a new pump. Now that Chuan was working away from the farm, he could see everything clearly. Nothing could save the place, and nothing could convince his father of the truth of this.

‘I just don’t really understand why, that’s all,’ Lina said, arms folded, looking down at us in the trench we’d made.

‘If you understood everything in the world, you wouldn’t be human.’ Chuan resumed his work and I took it as a sign that I should do the same.

‘Fong asked us to do it,’ I said lamely. I liked the comfort of the routine; it didn’t matter to me why we were doing it. It was something that belonged to me and Chuan.

‘If you want to spend your life doing what people tell you, that’s your problem.’

The soil was baked. The men had to work at it hard until it came apart in clumps as dense as stone, which then crumbled into dust that got into our mouths and eyes and felt gritty on our tongues. We spat, but the taste of earth – grassy and bitter – remained. When we paused, the men lit clove cigarettes which they said helped keep the thirst away, and I said that made no sense, but they just laughed. They offered me a kretek but I took one of Chuan’s Marlboros instead. ‘One day you boys will learn to smoke Gudang Garam like real men,’ Budi said.

‘Doesn’t matter what we smoke,’ Chuan replied. ‘We’re all going to die of lung cancer anyway.’

‘Let me try one,’ I said, and one of the new workers handed me his kretek. It tasted sour and pungent but also sweet, and most of all it tasted of newness, and by the second or third drag it had become familiar, as if I’d been smoking these cigarettes all my life.

‘The boy’s becoming a man after all,’ Budi said and gave me another, and the strangest thing was that I wasn’t so thirsty after that – the men were right. We resumed work, and as I shovelled the earth I became aware that I was performing each action without thinking; my body was working at the same rhythm as the others. For as long as I could remember I had been conscious of my body and its limitations. Run faster, play harder. Every gesture made me aware of what my body could not do. How could I stop sitting like a girl? How could I walk like a man? Sometimes it felt as though the very act of breathing was something I had to re-learn, so as not to be different from the others. Now, suddenly, I was no longer afraid of my body, no longer anxious that it would betray me. I had become insignificant; no one was looking at me, no one cared. I kept waiting for my body to fail – for my knees to buckle or my shoulders to strain – but it did not. I held the taste of spiced cigarettes and red dust in my mouth and resisted the urge to spit. That day, like all the others, it was very hot. It felt as though my body was melting into the land.

Chuan and I returned to the hangar coated in fine red dust. When he took off his T-shirt his torso was a different colour. I couldn’t stop laughing. ‘You really need to wash.’

‘What about you?’ he said. ‘I wish I had a camera to take a photo of you right now.’ With his forefinger he drew two lines across each of my cheeks and showed me the dust on his fingertip. His touch was cool and light, barely grazing my skin. ‘Now you look like a long-lost tribesman who has just emerged from the jungle. Quite beautiful actually.’

I peered into the wing mirror of his scooter and my face appeared, bulbous and scarlet and wild.

‘I have an idea,’ he said and set out towards the woods. He paused and turned to make sure I was following and then continued. We traced a route that led us in and out of the orchards and stretches of forest until we were far from the hangar and even further from the house, and when we passed through the grove of giant tamarind trees I knew we were close to the small lake that I’d seen but never dared to approach. Its black water seemed dangerous and I had heard of too many kids who’d drowned in ponds that appeared placid but were in fact much deeper than they looked – the pit of an old tin mine filled slowly with rainwater over the years to form a perfectly flat lake. You stepped off the ledge of the warm shallows and the shock of the cold deep water took your breath away. You sank into the darkness. The country was full of these mines, especially up north where my grandmother lived. I remember a child near her house drowning – a neighbour’s son who had been about my age. He had taken just a minute or two to drown, according to the other kids who’d been with him. When I went past his body that had been laid out in a coffin in front of his family’s house, I was supposed to bow and pay my respects like everyone else, but instead I stared at his face and remained transfixed. We hadn’t been friends but we had waved to each other and said hello on several occasions. We even looked like each other. Now he was dead and I was alive. My mother had been furious with me for staring; I had looked into the face of death and she would have to go to the temple to get an amulet for me to ward off evil spirits. My father dismissed this as superstition and forbade her from going. How could you believe in that nonsense, he’d said. Anyone would think you didn’t have an education.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ Chuan said now, beckoning to me. He waded slowly into the shallows, his arms extended. He kept on until he was knee deep, the water lapping at the hem of his shorts. Beyond him, the surface of the lake appeared as flat and slick as a sheet of glass. He leaned forward and began to splash water over his arms and body, scooping handfuls to wash his face, and then, as if his legs had buckled, he collapsed and disappeared underwater for a few seconds, before leaping up again with a whooping cry which rang out in the silence around us, filling the forest with life. ‘Come on!’ he shouted. ‘You’re going to be an old man if you wait any longer.’ I took a step towards the edge of the lake, kicking off my shoes, and looked at the murky water. He waded toward me, hands outstretched, and I stepped in to meet him. The warmth reassured me, the mud velvety between my toes. I reached out to hold his hand for balance and we were in to our waists when I felt him tug at my arm and suddenly I was underwater, my feet kicking loosely. Through the bubbles and dull ringing of the water I could hear him laughing, and then I could feel him next to me, his arms around me, and just when I began to struggle for breath he lifted me so that I was standing again, or rather half crouching, but it didn’t matter because my head was clear and I was breathing once more. I wiped the water from my eyes. Look, you’re clean, I heard him say, but there was water in my ears and his voice sounded like an echo, but it was loud and it was free – in fact it sounded different, brighter, a stranger’s voice. He threw himself in the water again with an exuberant cry like some rare bird. No one could hear us, I realised; no one knew we were here.

Sui Ching and Jack first met when she was in her final year at technical college and ended up in a class he was teaching, a required mathematics course for people going on to work as electricians or in other technical jobs – not the kind of work that she’d ever imagined doing when she was a child, but better than nothing, and certainly a step up from the small vegetable farm her parents ran. When she was a teenager, her teachers praised the drawings and watercolours she produced during the single hour of art lessons at school each week, and in her adolescent fantasies she thought that maybe she could become a painter, even though she had no idea how artists lived, or made a living. It just seemed like the opposite of the life she had known up until then, dictated by early starts and rigid routine helping her parents at work, and that was enough to make it appealing to her. But even as she daydreamed she knew that she would have to get a proper job with a salary. She was smart, she could read fluently and work out numbers quickly, and soon she was managing her parents’ income, paltry though it was, setting aside enough money to buy fertiliser and new tools whenever she could. ‘It’s called budgeting,’ she explained to her parents, barely able to control her exasperation. Why couldn’t they grasp something so simple?

It wasn’t only money that was beyond them. They couldn’t understand English, could just about get by in Malay, couldn’t write fluently in Chinese. She was sixteen, and already responsible for taking them to the bank to set up an account, to the police station and local registry when one of them lost their ID card or driving licence, to the immigration department for passports. Every visit to a government office prompted her to have the same questions: why did all the officials in these places always call her Ah Moy? Did they really think that all Chinese girls had the same name, and if so, how did they decide on Ah Moy – why not Ah Mei, Ah Ching, Ah Ling? Who decides on a racist nickname? Why couldn’t her parents lose their accent and speak properly so that the people in power couldn’t make fun of them, repeating what they’d just said in an even more exaggerated manner? Why did her parents have to speak to her in Cantonese, their country accents obvious to anyone even if they couldn’t understand the dialect? Sometimes she felt like laughing along with the officials, to show that she was on their side. She didn’t know if those people – sitting behind Plexiglas screens, wearing uniforms and name badges – looked down on her and her family because they were Chinese, or because they were poor. She wanted to be one of those people who did the despising, not those who were despised.

Who was the despiser, who the despised, within her own family? One day, her father came into her room, poised at the door, while she was lying on her bed reading a magazine and listening to a Tsai Chin cassette that she had bought with the money she’d earned from her after-school work. He’d come to pester her about doing more hours on the farm, but she ignored him. When she finally looked up, she saw the hatred on his face, the hatred for what he saw as her laziness, which filled him with revulsion – it was, to him, despicable. He turned off the player, took the tape out and tried to break it, but he couldn’t, he was too weak; his hands, which were supposed to have been strong after years of working the soil had been rendered fragile by that labour, and he ended up flinging it on the floor, a sign of authority that they both knew, in that moment, was a sign of helplessness. They stared at the little plastic rectangle for a few moments before he turned and left. She knew he had to go back to farming his little patch of earth, and she couldn’t stop herself from loathing him for having to do that kind of work.

She carried on flicking through the pages of her magazine, thinking quite clearly: it was them or her, she couldn’t save all of them, and she had already made her choice.

Later, living in the capital, with some money saved up from her work, she enrolled in college and met people who spoke English fluently, who’d been to Singapore and Hong Kong on holiday, who went to the cinema, spent time in restaurants for the pleasure of being together, just talking, with no aim other than to enjoy an agreeable moment. She slipped into this way of being as if it had always been hers. Her family background felt weightless, irrelevant, floating away from her. It was the mid-1970s and everyone was occupied with finding a job, getting married, saving up to buy a small modern house in the new suburbs of Petaling Jaya, on one of those endless neat streets arranged in grids with small front yards and space to park a little Datsun. She would have liked one too – a house rather than a marriage, although she wasn’t opposed to the latter, she just hadn’t given it much serious thought. There seemed to be so much to achieve and experience before she committed to the husband and the home, so many places to travel to, people to meet. Maybe she could learn a new language – Japanese, maybe, since she was fascinated by its cadences at once harsh and gentle, and also by its transformative nature. She learned a few words and repeated them in front of the mirror, and was astonished by how she became a different person. The next time she did so she put extra powder on her face, giving herself a lighter complexion, and when the words came out of her mouth she felt as if she were inhabiting someone else’s body. The sensation was not unpleasant. It was a kind of relief.

In a compulsory mathematics class she took, the other students complained about the futility of the lesson. Most of them were young men eager to get their diploma and venture out into the workplace. They didn’t need to know algebra if they were going to work as electrical technicians, they said, and they were right. It didn’t help that the teacher spent most of the time talking about abstract notions such as the architecture of mathematics, and how one could build images of outer space using maths. If you thought about it, he said, it was like painting or music – it was art.

The students giggled. Sui looked around at the boisterous young men, provincial like her. She was the only woman in the class, and enjoyed being the oddity in a field dominated by men. A girl working as an electrician – who could imagine that?

Why are you taking this diploma? Jack asked her after class one day.

Because, she said, I want to learn about art.

He laughed. Then you’re in the right place.

For weeks afterwards, Jack’s was the only lesson she looked forward to. It’s useless, her colleagues muttered under their breath as they passed rude messages about Jack to each other. But for Sui it was precisely the futility of Jack’s endeavour that made the class interesting to her. She understood almost nothing of what he was teaching, but admired the way he continued writing equations and diagrams on the blackboard even though half the class was slumped over on their desks dozing.

At the end of the term he announced that he’d taken a new job elsewhere. He was sliding his papers neatly into his satchel and she noticed the chalk on his fingers, which were slimmer and more delicate that her own. I’ll be a junior professor teaching on the maths degree at university.

Which one? she asked out of politeness.

He told her, but she wasn’t really listening – it didn’t make any difference to her. She said, It’ll be better than teaching here.

He produced a neatly folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. You can write to me at this address. He cleared his throat. I mean, if you want to.

Sure, she said, slipping the note into the pocket of her skirt without unfolding it. I’ll write some day – if I don’t forget about you.

He laughed and slung his satchel over his shoulder. Good luck with your studies, he said as he left.

She felt as though she had lost something, though she didn’t know what.

Chuan spreads his arms skywards and tumbles backwards into the water. No, he flings himself into the water. Maybe he is trying to perform a somersault; there is an arch in his back as he disappears with an extravagant splash that engulfs his cry. The ripples on the surface turn into tiny waves that eventually reach Jay, who is standing further away, in the shallows – who does not dare venture any deeper. Already the water is up to his waist; his feet are uncertain, slipping on the muddy bottom. He feels as if he is slowly sinking. How long has Chuan been underwater? Ten, twenty seconds? It feels longer. Jay has lost all notion of time.

It is the afternoon, the sun is still high, but who knows whether it is the hour when people break for lunch, or soon to be dinner? It seems irrelevant to determine precisely where he and Chuan stand in relation to time, or to the others around them. They are marooned in the afternoon.

Perhaps drifting slightly, though he doesn’t know in which direction.

He scans the surface of the water for bubbles that might betray Chuan’s position, but the lake is regaining its composure and Jay can see nothing in the murky depths, not even his legs, and suddenly he is touched by a sensation of panic. He is expecting something to seize his legs and drag him to the middle of this isolated stretch of water. He imagines what it might be like to be eaten by a crocodile. He read somewhere that they are unable to chew their prey, and have to lodge it under logs at the bottom of rivers until they decompose. When they found Jay’s body in the stomach of a crocodile, everyone would wonder why he’d gone to the lake. What madness had seized him.

Woo-ooooo!

Chuan leaps from the water, not far from Jay – he must have held his breath and swum all the way across. He tosses his head from side to side to flick the water from his hair and eyes, and the dyed-blond tips of his hair catch the light and appear almost white. His voice, his exuberance, transform the lake and its surroundings into somewhere tame, familiar.

Come on, Chuan says, taking Jay by the hand. Jay walks, stumbles, until his toes are freed from the mud and he is treading water to stay afloat. What the . . . he starts to say but swallows some water and sputters. Chuan pulls him, fingers gripping his wrist. They are an awkward unit, two bodies trying to stay close to each other, pushing towards the middle of the lake, and Jay starts to find it too difficult simultaneously to hang on to Chuan’s hand and stay afloat. That rush of fear returns to him once again, but only briefly this time, and suddenly – he doesn’t know how – he has separated from Chuan, who is striking out to the opposite shore. Jay considers turning back. They are not quite halfway across, but a long way from their point of departure. Reeds obscure where he was standing just a few moments ago; he can’t even discern his starting point and a fallen tree now appears to block the route back; but the far bank seems unattainable – so much distance. He treads water, hesitating.

What the hell are you doing here, Jay?

He puts his head in the water and swims, properly, as he has been taught during swimming lessons after school. When he was a child, he fell into a fishpond at the zoo and his parents decided that he should learn to swim. It would also help with his asthma, they were told, so it wasn’t a waste of money. At first, he hated undressing in front of other boys, hated the giggling and pointing. By revealing his body to them he felt as though he was revealing his own desires, and they would know who he truly was. But his parents had insisted. We will have a child who isn’t sick and won’t drown – it’s worth the money, his father had said. Now he finds he can swim surprisingly fast, far above whatever unnameable dangers exist below him. When he lifts his head to check his position, he has edged past Chuan and is past the midpoint. A white egret flies overhead, extending its wings as it steadies itself to land in the marshy grass that lines the lake. It swoops so close that Jay can see the perfect black pupils of its eyes, two glass marbles.

He swims with ease, his body borne now by the water that just a while ago seemed terrifying, and without knowing how, he senses that the water has become shallow enough to stand. He breathes heavily as he looks for Chuan, who is still in the middle of the lake. Has he moved at all since Jay last saw him? He seems to be bobbing along, his head lifting and dropping with fatigue. Jay launches himself into the water towards Chuan, and in no time at all he is next to him.

In no time. I can’t remember how long all this takes to unfold; it doesn’t matter.

Chuan puts his arms around Jay’s neck and the weight makes Jay slow down and sink slightly, but they are both moving towards the shore. Save me, save me, Chuan jokes, and when Jay opens his mouth to answer, he swallows some water, which tastes warm and earthy. You can’t even swim properly – he gurgles, lifting his chin to keep his head clear. Chuan’s legs flail in the water and clash with Jay’s, and occasionally his knee knocks into the small of Jay’s back. I’m drowning, I’m drowning! Chuan says in a theatrical whine, locking his arm even more tightly around Jay’s neck, drawing him closer, their heads almost touching, and Jay feels his breath against his ear, sticky and strange. He wishes the other shore were further away, even just by a bit – twenty, thirty feet, say. He wants this closeness to last a little longer. They begin to detach when they reach the shade cast by the overhanging branches; they are safe now.

Chuan doggy-paddles into the shallows while Jay glides into a breaststroke which propels him towards the shore. He stands up and picks his way through the submerged roots of the giant trees overhead and rests on a log that slopes from the muddy bank into the water, waiting for Chuan to arrive. Waaahh! Chuan shouts as he lifts himself up from the water and sweeps his hair back from his face with both hands. I didn’t know you could swim so well.

I didn’t know you swam so badly, Jay replies. I thought you guys grew up playing in rivers and lakes.

We’re not like you, we don’t have fancy country clubs to teach us how to swim.

I don’t go to a country club.

You swim very well.

Does that surprise you?

No. Chuan laughs. He walks up to Jay and stands in front of him. Is this a challenge or an invitation? Jay notices the rise and fall of Chuan’s chest, the tightening of his stomach; he is heaving, or in any case more heavily than Jay, who doesn’t feel out of breath at all, and in the silence that surrounds them, Jay imagines he can hear Chuan’s inhalations and exhalations. He notices, also, the beads of water slipping unevenly down Chuan’s torso, and looks away. In the water, tiny fish dart around his ankles, dipping their heads to nibble at his feet.

Chuan sits down next to him on the log. According to legend, he says, a beautiful maiden fell in love with a—

Why is it always a beautiful maiden? Don’t tell me, she needed saving, right? Or was she abandoned by some handsome guy?

Can you just shut up? Chuan surveys the lake. Anyway, she came here every day because the man she loved was betrothed to someone else, and because she found it so peaceful here, she spent her entire life alone without needing anyone. That’s why it’s so calm.

Sorry, I’m going to vomit.

You’re so cynical.

There is a note of annoyance in Chuan’s voice, which makes Jay regret what he said. The sun has begun to fall and its slanting rays illuminate the far bank, amber and syrupy. The shadows overhead stretch further into the lake now, forming strange mesmerising shapes on the water. He has only been here for just over a week but he can already anticipate the changing of the light.

It’s a nice story, Jay says. A bit predictable, that’s all. The pretty maiden and all that.

I know, Chuan replies. We could make up our own.

I have an idea.

Go on, surprise me.

What if it’s a boy? Who comes here because he’s yearning for another boy?

Small birds, perhaps swifts, scatter across the sky. Jay realises he is holding his breath.

Nice, Chuan says after a while. I like it.

When we got back to the house an altercation arose almost immediately. It was late when we arrived, and it was true, we could have hurried as dusk fell, we knew what time the others usually sat down to dinner. My father, especially, was a man of habit. We might have walked faster across the orchards but instead we took our time. I wanted to prolong the afternoon, to stave off the evening and its inevitable sociability, but I said nothing as we slouched home. The others had just cleared away dinner as we stepped into the house, but my mother said she’d left us some food in the fridge. ‘Are you boys all right?’ she said. ‘You’ve been working a lot today.’

‘A lot of clearing up to do,’ Chuan explained. ‘And I wanted to show Jay the rest of the farm, so he understands what my dearest father wants us to do.’

My mother wiped her hands on a towel. ‘Your dearest father has always had ambitious plans.’ She went to the fridge and brought two dishes out. ‘Pity there isn’t a microwave.’

‘It’s fine, thank you – we’re going into town to get some dinner anyway,’ Chuan said. We hadn’t talked about this, but of course there was nothing I wanted more.

‘We meaning who?’ my father said. ‘I can’t imagine Jay making any decisions.’

‘We meaning me and Jay,’ Chuan said. ‘Who else? We talked about the options and since we were late, we decided to go into town.’

‘Don’t talk back to Mr Lim,’ Fong said, his voice suddenly becoming sharp and quick. ‘Anyone would think I didn’t teach you any manners.’

‘Why?’ Chuan said. ‘Is it a crime to go into town for dinner?’

Fong blinked as if he couldn’t comprehend what Chuan had said. ‘You . . .’ We waited for him to continue but his sentence had faded into the night. Geckos had gathered on the ceiling above his head, attracted by the moths fluttering around the light; one of them darted at its prey but missed.

‘It’s not a big deal, is it?’ I said, turning to my mother, who seemed the most likely peacekeeper in that moment, but she didn’t answer. Her tightly drawn mouth and blank expression were her default strategy to deal with conflict. Whatever she believed, she wasn’t going to risk confrontation.

Chuan returned the two plates of rice to the fridge. ‘Let’s go, I’m hungry.’

Chuan! Fong shouted in a strange, strangulated manner, almost choking. My father made a noise that sounded like a chuckle and turned to my mother, nodding as if confirming to her some longstanding belief. He left the kitchen and headed directly upstairs, too tired or noble to be part of this messy clash, and his sudden departure accentuated the tension. I touched Chuan’s elbow and signalled for us to leave. As we went out, my mother and Fong sat facing each other with the formality of temple statues, beautiful and mute.

Lina was on the veranda eating her customary jam sandwich and reading a book. She had lit four mosquito coils, sending spirals of smoke so thick we could barely see her.

‘Are you praying to Guan Yin or something?’ Chuan said.

‘I’m praying that you won’t come back drunk or hungover like you did last time,’ she said, without looking up.

‘Is your book interesting?’

She turned the book so that we could see its cover – The Color Purple. ‘Too difficult for your simple minds,’ she said.

He mouthed the words fuck you and I laughed.

‘Hey,’ she said, putting her book aside and reaching into her pocket to fish out some money. ‘Can you buy me some cigarettes? I’ve run out and I’m getting desperate.’

He took the notes from her and waved them in the air. ‘What if I run away with your money and never come back?’

She went back to reading her book. ‘I don’t care. I’m sure it’ll change your life. Take my brother while you’re at it. Run away with Jay and twenty bucks and never come back,’ she drawled, deadpan from behind her cloud of smoke.

*

The night market was at its peak when we arrived, the heavy beats of music throbbing from the loudspeakers as we went past the stands selling cheap clothing and headed towards the food stalls. Chuan paused to look at the football shirts and at one place stopped to unfurl a blue-and-white T-shirt with a crocodile logo, which he tossed back onto the pile, saying it was ‘too fake’.

‘What does too fake mean?’ I said. ‘Either something is fake or it isn’t.’

‘I’m just looking for something fake that doesn’t look fake.’

He knew most of the stallholders and chatted to them about how their kids were doing, how business was. An older woman, grey roots showing under her purple hair, sat in her stall surrounded by soft spangled dresses and asked after Fong. Shame your father doesn’t have a girlfriend, she said to Chuan. Otherwise he could buy a dress for her. How about something for that girl you’re always hanging out with? But Chuan waved her away and we continued walking through the crowds, stopping at a stand piled high with sports apparel. The seller was a Burmese woman, not much older than my sisters, but who already had two small children, one of whom was a baby strapped to her chest in an indigo cloth. She sold goods brought in from Thailand, from a factory that made Adidas and other logos and stitched them to cotton shirts and nylon bags. Chuan joked about her stock being old – he’d seen all her stuff before, when was she going to get a new shipment? She sighed and threw her hands up. Her brother worked as a transporter on the border, but he’d been arrested recently and though he only spent a couple of nights in jail, he’d had to bribe his way out and now he had to lie low. That was why she hadn’t received anything new recently – and besides, it wasn’t worth getting fresh items. No one was buying anything these days, she said. The first couple of months after the crash, business was great, counterfeit goods were the only things people could afford, but now everyone was cautious with their money. No one knew what was going to happen next. She’d heard that even the banks were running out of cash – not that she cared, she didn’t have a bank account. But still.

Chuan picked through a pile of T-shirts and eased one out from the bottom of the stack. It was red with white stripes on the sleeves and across the body. The Burmese woman watched him and smiled without saying anything. She had a handsome face with high cheekbones and a clear complexion. The elder of the two children sat on the tarmac at her feet, playing with a plastic truck. ‘Red is a nice colour,’ she said. ‘It suits you.’

‘It’s not for me,’ Chuan said and brought the shirt close to my collarbone. ‘Hold it there and let me see?’

I held the shirt under my chin, stretching it out to my shoulders, and he took a step back. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘I want to buy you something,’ he said.

‘But I don’t need any clothes.’

‘What do you think?’ he asked the vendor. ‘Is it okay?’

‘Very nice!’ she said, holding up a thumb. ‘That brand is very popular at the moment, everyone likes it.’

I looked at the logo and recognised it as something the boys at school liked.

‘It’s Italian,’ Chuan said. ‘Supposed to be, anyway.’

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I really don’t need anything. Really.’

He smoothed the fabric of the shirt to flatten it against me. I could feel his hand running down my chest and belly. ‘I know. But I want to buy you something.’

The stallholder stood next to him and nodded. ‘Beautiful,’ she said in Cantonese, and suggested a discount that seemed extravagantly generous to me.

An American song – a tune that was on the airwaves a lot that year – started playing from a speaker nearby, rising above the other beats. In class, boys would try to imitate the rap sequence, but it was too quick for them to catch in English so they had to replay it many times, so much that on some days I’d go home on the bus with the words playing in my head and couldn’t be sure if I was hearing the lyrics for real or merely in my imagination. Chuan lifted his head slowly as if testing the air, and I was reminded of the deer I had seen the day I arrived. ‘I love this song,’ he said.

‘So do I,’ I said.

Thinking of the day – when you went away. He lip-synced the words, clasping an invisible microphone and waving his finger at me as he followed the beat. He squeezed his eyes shut in his impromptu mini concert and the Burmese woman let out a full-throated laugh and danced along, her baby still asleep, bundled tightly against her. Chuan agreed a price with her and she shook my hand and told me her name was Bennu. ‘Do you want to wear the shirt now?’ she said.

‘Why not?’ I said. I took off my old shirt, which was heavy with sweat and dirt, and slipped on the new red one, which felt light and fresh on my skin. Bennu took the unwanted shirt from me and dropped it into a rubbish bag, and as we made our way into the crowd I felt she was still watching me.

At the stalls selling pirated CDs, we leafed through photo albums of everything that was on sale. The vendors placed pictures of the record covers in the albums and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands – too many to go through. We stopped at the three or four pages of Anita Mui records and Chuan pointed out her new album. It had only come out a few months before but was already bootlegged.

‘My father hates music. That’s why the house is always silent,’ Chuan said, nodding along to the jazzed-up dance version of a Jacky Cheung tune.

‘Mine’s the same,’ I said. At home we listened to our Walkmans.

‘When I get my new place I’m going to get a big TV and a karaoke set and a huge stereo,’ Chuan said. ‘You can come visit and we’ll stay up all night singing.’ The idea seemed so far-fetched yet, oddly, attainable, a combination that made me almost shiver with pleasure. The whole of the next school year suddenly seemed bearable. Every January I was gripped by the sensation of acute dread. This time, I could survive those endless weeks bolstered by the summertime visit to Chuan’s place, singing to his karaoke set and eating in the market and the new burger outlet. The idea of this ran through me like a hot thrill. I wished we were already a year older. A year freer.

We went past the part of the market selling fruit and snacks and finally made it to the stalls at the far end, where folding tables and plastic stools were set up across the street. Chuan waved at some people and we sat down at a spot near the roti stall. ‘I feel like having murtabak,’ Chuan said. ‘Something greasy and meaty.’ He ordered extra curry sauce even though I told him not to – it was too much and we wouldn’t finish it, and he said he didn’t care, he was in a good mood and he was hungry. While we waited for the food to arrive, he texted Jessie and asked her to join us, and though I wanted to keep things at just the two of us, I didn’t say anything; I didn’t want to do anything to upset the delicate perfection of that evening.

We ripped apart the hot roti with our fingers. I was tearing a piece of it off when Chuan poured the curry all over the plate and the back of my hand got smeared with it. ‘Lick it off!’ he said, so I did, but a couple of minutes later there was a blind man being led by his child through the market, selling packs of tissue paper, and Chuan bought five, even though we didn’t need so many, and told the kid to keep the change. They came to the market every night, Chuan said; sometimes he talked to them, but not tonight. He didn’t want to hear about their life story right now – you can imagine what it was like.

We finished the first order but were still hungry, we could have eaten exactly the same thing again, but I suggested getting some Hokkien mee instead. I went to order it but realised I didn’t have any money, so Chuan gave me some. ‘Order a lot!’ he shouted as I picked my way through the crowd, and I turned around to give him a thumbs up. When I got back Jessie had arrived and was sitting with her elbows on the table, her face cupped in her palms. Chuan had his hand on her forearm in a comforting gesture but withdrew it as I approached.

‘Hey, how’s it going?’ I said when I sat down. She’d done her hair differently; it was curlier, more voluminous, and her eyes were made up with jade-green shadow that gave her a melancholy, distant look.

‘Life is shit,’ she replied, and reached for the half-drunk sugar-cane drink she’d arrived with. She looked at it and said, ‘Can I have a beer instead?’

Chuan gave me more money and I went to the drinks stall to get her a Tiger, and when I came back she seemed a bit cheerier. She’d been sacked that day, she told us. The hair salon she worked at was moving to a smaller place and they couldn’t keep all their employees. The boss-lady herself would be doing the shampooing and sweeping up – there wasn’t enough business to keep things going the way they were. Everyone thought that hairdressing was the only thing that would survive these bad months but people were more careful these days, women did their hair themselves, they no longer came in for a shampoo and blow-dry as a treat. Jessie didn’t know what to do now. Her plan had been to move to Singapore or KL soon and get a job doing hair and make-up for celebrities, but now she was stuck in this lousy town.

‘But we’ll be here to keep you company,’ Chuan said, reaching out to touch her shoulder.

She shrugged his hand away, feigning annoyance. ‘He’ll be gone in a few weeks and you’ll be working like a slave to pay your rent – and I’ll be walking the streets like a cheap prostitute.’

‘In your dreams,’ Chuan said. ‘Listen, don’t worry, you’ll get a job somewhere else and nothing will change.’

‘That’s the problem,’ she said, lifting the bottle to her lips and throwing her head back to drain the last drops of beer. ‘Nothing ever changes here.’

The noodles arrived, two big plates, and we ate more slowly than before. Jessie said she’d already eaten but the food smelled so good that she joined in, and when she’d finished her first bowl she helped herself to more. ‘Hey, it’s your song,’ Chuan said, and Jessie’s face brightened. I could hear at least half a dozen songs being played on loudspeakers, the noise came to me in one confused mass, but then Jessie sang the chorus in English and I knew the one she meant. Un-break my heart, she sang together with Chuan. They didn’t know the words beyond that but it didn’t matter. Just singing that one line loudly, several times, seemed to cheer her up.

‘Jessie always has bad luck with boyfriends,’ Chuan said. ‘Don’t you?’

‘It’s not my fault that men are so stupid.’

Chuan got some cash out of his wallet and saw that he had just enough to get three beers, so I went off to get more Tigers. ‘Be careful, kid,’ Jessie said, ‘Remember what happened last time!’ I drank slowly, and this time the beer didn’t taste as strange and acrid as it had before, or maybe it was because I had eaten, and it was night-time; I felt stable.

The lights glowed white against the night sky. Some of the vendors were calling out the prices of their goods on hand-held loudspeakers, their voices hypnotic and mechanical, pleading, seducing, competing with the thump of the bass from the loudspeakers and the music that drifted above the market in four or five different languages, Mandarin interlaced with Malay and Cantonese and English, against the drumming of Bollywood songs and techno tunes, and sometimes I would pick out a line of a song that would then be swallowed by other words, one ecstatic anthem rolling on top of the previous one, an invitation to sing for joy or sadness, to move our bodies and dance. The smell of cooking grease and spices and frying chilli that occasionally caught the back of my throat was washed away by the sweet bitterness of the beer, and the taste of all of this seemed so fresh and magnificent to me that I couldn’t believe it repeated every evening, even when I was not here; and I felt a sort of loss for all the moments in the past I’d missed, and all the times in the future when I would be elsewhere. All the vendors and their wares would be here, but I wouldn’t: the lucky cat statuettes would still be golden and waving their paws, the alarm clocks would be ringing, the children’s pyjama sets would be hanging from rails but I would be back in the city. I smoothed my new red shirt. At least I would still have that.

‘Pretty,’ Jessie said. ‘Is it new?’

I nodded. ‘From Chuan.’

‘How cute!’ She pursed her lips and blew kissing noises that made us laugh.

A commotion rose from the far end of the street: the sound of angry voices belonging to young men, swearing, laughter and jeering. The kind of noise that a group of men made to draw attention to itself. As a child I used to wonder how the other boys learned to make these sounds, each voice amplified by its peers, so that by the time the kids were fifteen or sixteen, the sound of the group would be so natural and comforting to them that they would barely know how to speak when they were alone. The men making their way towards us were about our age, maybe a bit older, and when Chuan glanced up and then away quickly I saw a flicker of recognition on his face, the tightening of his jaw signifying a changing of mood even though he was still smiling. They approached us from the right, over Chuan and Jessie’s shoulders – she, too, had clocked the presence of these people. She straightened her back, starting to tell us about her plans to dye her hair green, because she fancied a change, she really needed something to change in her life; the kind of story you tell when you want your friends to concentrate on you, and ignore what else might happen. There were about five or six men in the group, though I couldn’t be sure of the exact number – avoiding eye contact was a basic strategy I’d absorbed since I’d reached puberty. They went past Chuan in a ragged line and the first one bumped into his back, sending him lurching against the table; but Chuan did not turn around to fight back and Jessie paused in her story. I thought: how strange these situations are, where everyone can see what is happening, yet pretence is the only course of action. We listen to the music, we smell the food, we are blinded by the light, but we pretend that we are not hurt. As the tallest man sauntered past, he too pushed into Chuan, but with an outstretched hand instead of a hip. The slurs were muttered, vague. I heard them as a low mumbled chant, a refrain picked up by one member of the group after another, containing nothing I hadn’t heard before. Then the sharp clattering of their laughter, stones falling on a tin roof.

Chuan tensed, his shoulders tightening the way they did when we worked in the fields and he had to lift or pull something heavy. His elbows were on the table and I could see the outline of the sinews in his forearms. I hadn’t realised, until that moment, away from the farm, that I had come to recognise the way his body moved; that I understood him more than I thought, and could anticipate what he was going to do. ‘Chuan,’ I said, as calmly as I could.

‘What?’ he shot back, as if speaking to the group of men, not me. I repeated his name and smiled. On the edge of my field of vision I watched the men gathering around a table.

‘I’m exhausted,’ I said. ‘We’ve been out for ages, I need to sleep.’

He nodded and I felt him soften. ‘It’s time we left anyway.’

We took the long route back to the main street where we’d left the scooter, walking briskly in an arc away from the men.

‘This town is full of idiots,’ Jessie said. ‘I need to get out of here.’

‘Idiots are everywhere,’ Chuan said. He was more relaxed now, walking with his customary gait, slightly on the balls of his feet.

‘At least in a big city you don’t have to see them every day.’

We walked her back to her place, which wasn’t far, only a couple of streets away. At the foot of her stairs she turned to blow us a kiss.

‘Will you be all right?’ I asked.

She shrugged and said, ‘I’m always all right.’

Heading back to the scooter, I said I was concerned for Jessie, and maybe we shouldn’t be leaving her alone the day she lost her job. She looked sad, I thought, but Chuan said she was tougher than she looked. She had been through a lot in life and we didn’t need to worry too much. ‘But you,’ he said, turning to me as we reached the scooter. He looked at me as though considering what to say. ‘We need to look after you.’

‘I could look after myself just as well, if I had to.’

‘But you don’t have to,’ he said, and handed me a helmet.

We got onto the scooter and just before he started up the motor he turned and said, ‘I’m going to teach you to ride this, so you can get around yourself if I’m not here.’ It was late and the lights of the town swiftly gave way to darkness, long before we left the last of the residential streets. On the dark roads leading back to the farm I could recognise the curves in the landscape, the shapes of the different clumps of trees. The beam of the headlight picked out the occasional cat that scampered across our path and small clouds of insects, but otherwise we were alone.

There’s always a scheme, Jack says – always some half-baked idea. Costs, always costs, all your crazy plans involve money. Money money money. He says the words in a kind of bazaar English, an oily voice with bloated vowels that he thinks street vendors and uneducated people use – the kind of voice he believes is Fong’s. What sort of project is this? (That voice again.) Dig up everything on the farm and replace it with pineapple – why? Pineapple is more drought-resistant, Fong says, and, you know, in view of the long dry spell, you know. He is aware he can’t get his words straight, he begins to mumble, and suddenly he sees his proposal the way Jack surely does – a haphazard tangle of thoughts.

Crows fly overhead in a tangle of black feathers, two of them attacking a third, their cries sounding almost human. At one point they plunge from a height, all in unison, and just when it seems as though they will plummet to the ground they take off again, the lone bird detaching itself at last, beating its wings desperately.

Jack sighs. This year drought, next year floods. That’s what the world is like these days. America makes more cars, the ozone layer over Wisconsin gets damaged, we get rain. You think you can control that? All your plans over the years – this is the result.

He stretches out both arms, palms facing the sky, presenting an imaginary gift to the world. After a few moments of silence, he says, I can’t keep paying for your mistakes.

Fong looks out at the view, the familiar landscape of half-dead trees and wilting crops. It’s true, this new idea is not going to work, because it requires the thing Jack hates most in this world: money. It is not because Jack is stingy, or even that Jack believes money to be vulgar, the opposite of the scholarship and refinement he pursues; his distaste of it swells from a deeper source, one that is imperceptible to all but Fong, for whom it is obvious. Money is what binds Jack to Fong; this is why Jack hates this slimy, poisonous thing. It is a reminder that they share the same blood and skin. If it were not for a slight glitch of fate, one man could easily have been the other. Had their father’s desire for love or sex or security played out differently over the course of his lifetime, had he been more daring or radical in his choice of partner, he might have married Fong’s mother and relegated Jack’s to the role of perpetual mistress.

Their father had followed a path all too predictable for a man of his generation, hiring a matchmaker to find him a fellow Cantonese speaker a good few years younger than himself when he was finally able to afford to raise a family, and, many years later, when his children were almost adults themselves, starting a romance with an even younger woman who he’d met in a bar. One pairing was made by arrangement, the other by chance; one sanctioned, the other illicit. One out of love, the other out of – what? Desire? That is how the world appreciates these relationships, Fong is aware of that. And yet he remembers how his parents were when they were together, the intimacy and freedom of their voices, the quick, teasing chatter, the way his father would respond in good-natured expletives while his mother recounted something that had happened to her that day. They were easy and unashamed with their touch, too, always reaching to place a hand on their partner’s arm, a slow squeeze of the waist, a playful slap on the shoulder. Fong knew even at a young age that this physical warmth was unusual. Which other Chinese people of his father’s age would caress their partner so affectionately in public? Fong couldn’t see anyone else who did.

Fong expected that his father was different in his other home – a thin, dry life of duty, almost joyless, to be tolerated rather than savoured, but which in some way brought him as much satisfaction as his time with Fong’s mother. The old man needed both sides of the equation to feel whole, Fong understood. It was like the negatives of the colourful photos that Fong’s mother placed in frames around their house, snapshots of herself and his father at dinner, or the three of them strolling in the Lake Gardens looking happy, a three-year-old Fong reaching up and clutching his parents’ hands as if they were the only family in the world. Soon he would discover that this little life of theirs was a life in negative, and the full colour portrait lay elsewhere, filled with his father’s real family – with Jack, his brothers and sister, and Grandma Lim. Yet without the ghostly negative, in which everything appeared shadowy and imprecise, the official family, with its sharp, easy definition, could not have existed; the happiness that his father enjoyed with his mistress made it possible for him to stay with his wife – that was how Fong liked to think of it as he grew older.

Mistress. Wife. No one had to explain these terms to him, the difference in status. He knew which position his mother occupied simply by observing the negatives – what she omitted from the story, instead of what she told him. Pa is coming home tomorrow; Pa is very busy with work; your father is taking us to Oversea restaurant for your birthday next week. Fong was always struck by the silence surrounding the rest of his father’s life, when he was not with them – which was most of the time. His mother made no attempt to fill in the gaps or conjure a fantastic story of his absence, which would have been so easy, especially when Fong was little and ready to believe anything. She didn’t lie, didn’t even stretch the truth to make her son believe that they were normal – because in her mind, they were normal. She never felt that Fong was the bastard son of a man married to someone else; she never thought that he was born out of wedlock (such a terrible expression, with its connotations of prison!). All she had to do was to concentrate on the moments they shared, those snatched evenings in the middle of the week, the odd weekend, a trip to Singapore once a year. It was enough to make her believe that all was as it should be.

It was precisely her insistence on this normality that made Fong realise that their lives were not normal. He was barely ten years old when he made sense of things. His mother had worked in a bar, as one of the hostesses who poured men their drinks and spent time chatting with them, making them feel better after a long day at work. Even as a small child he could see she had an easy way with men, always ready with a quip, always teasing and flattering. By the time Fong was born, she had quit, but her old friends from her working days would still call round, men who wore thick gold rings and heavy necklaces. Theirs was a small house in PJ Old Town – a sleepy road where these men and their cars looked out of place. They didn’t come from the same world as his father; they were from his mother’s former life, before she met his father. When she was just a bar girl.

That is why Jack hates money. It ties him to this son of a bar girl, who also happens to be his flesh and blood. In another life Jack could have been the bastard, and Fong the inheritor. His money is a reminder of this stain – of a life lived in the negative.

Wife, mistress, normal, abnormal. Fong knows what they mean, and how they categorise the world neatly, but the distinctions they create always seemed so arbitrary to him.

Don’t bother with any more projects, Jack says to Fong as he turns to walk slowly back to the house. You’ll just create more stress for yourself. He puts a hand on Fong’s shoulder briefly as he passes him, a gesture that is meant to be generous, Fong realises, and yet he cannot help but shrug off Jack’s hand.

Huh. Jack laughs and trudges away. What can you expect from a man with that kind of upbringing – that’s what his little chuckle means. It confirms everything he believes of Fong, who has heard that dismissive laugh many times before. He is the son of a bar girl. Bastard whore slut. Those are really the words that Jack means to use.

It was a ridiculous idea to build new irrigation channels for the farm, Fong concedes – totally impractical and doomed from the start. Maybe Jack is right: he does think like an uneducated peasant, always building his logic along the same narrow channels, continuing with the same approach no matter how many times it fails. Perseverance has always been his philosophy in life, proof of his dedication to his son and his home; of his resilience as a man and a human being; but now he can see it is merely proof of his ignorance. He needs to start thinking like Jack. What was the phrase he heard on TV recently? Thinking outside the box. Such a strange expression, he’d thought at first, but now he realises it applies perfectly to him. He has been in a box all his life, unable to break free.

There is not enough space on the bed for two of them to lie down on their backs, so they have to stretch out on their sides to avoid touching each other. Why this charade, when all they both wish to do is precisely to reach out and touch the body lying next to them? At least Jay does.

Are you tired? he asks. Whispers. The walls are thin wood partitions that do not rise to the ceiling, and each night Jay can hear the others in their rooms, coughing, sighing. Just when he thinks everyone is asleep he will hear Lina or Yin giggle, and realise that they are also still awake even though their lights are out. What keeps them awake when they should be asleep? he wonders. In those moments Jay is usually up because he is waiting for Chuan, and the anxiety makes slumber impossible. But tonight he does not have such worries; Chuan is here; and yet sleep evades him.

No, Chuan replies and shakes his head; his hair rustles softly on the rough cotton pillow. You?

Jay doesn’t know how to answer. He can feel the soothing ache of his limbs from a whole day outdoors, working, swimming, riding into town, but his body has never felt more alert.

A bit, he mumbles.

In one of the other rooms, someone begins to snore, a series of thin rasping breaths that ends in a little strangled cry that makes both Jay and Chuan laugh, and the effort of suppressing their laughter increases the hilarity of the situation. That’s my father, Jay attempts to whisper, but his ribcage has contracted so much that he is unable to speak. In the dark he can see Chuan’s shoulders shaking; it really is so ridiculous, they are laughing about nothing, yet they cannot stop. When, at last, the comedy subsides, Jay finds that they are both breathing heavily, trying to regain a sense of calm. Outside, the cacophony of jungle insects starts up suddenly. He reaches out and touches Chuan’s arm, and it is like touching a trigger, because suddenly he cannot hear his breaths, cannot hear anything, just a hollow ringing in his ears as if he is underwater. Chuan’s skin is clammy and warm. He curls his fingers lightly to grip Chuan’s bicep and waits for some response.

What’s that? His heartbeats – he can hear those. Dull, regular.

At last Chuan turns around to face Jay, and in that motion Jay is forced to withdraw his hand, which now feels out of place, superfluous. Chuan looks at him and purses his lips to say something but it is so soft that Jay cannot hear it.

Shh – he hears Chuan say at last. A thin hushing sound, almost like a whistle. Shh. Which is strange, because no one is making any noise.

When my sisters and I were very small, my mother went away for a few days very abruptly without leaving us news as to her whereabouts. My father eventually told us she had gone to see some relatives whom we had never met, and would be home soon, though the timeframe was undefined. I cannot recall being afraid or concerned during this time, but I can remember Yin crying every day, inconsolably, despite Lina’s best attempts to tempt her out to ride our bicycles around the neighbourhood. Our father had to go to work every day, and our mother’s absence left us with a greater freedom to do as we pleased. We could turn on the TV whenever we wanted to and make ourselves instant noodles at odd times of the day. I wasn’t unhappy with her sudden disappearance and now I could barely remember it, but Yin, two years older and possessing greater lucidity than me, seemed marked by this abandonment, which ultimately lasted only a few days, after which my mother came home and life picked up where it had left off. My mother had gone to visit some family members who hadn’t been well (she explained), and it was too difficult to take all of us with her. But the configuration of our relationship with our mother shifted slightly from then on, without anything dramatic happening. While Lina and I carried on as usual, Yin began to spend much more time with my mother, whose brief absence drew Yin closer to her, as if they were both terrified at the thought of another separation. At home, in my mind anyway, they were often to be found in the same room, cooking or reading magazines or watching TV. They liked the same programmes and had the same opinions on actors, politicians and news items. I would observe them sitting next to each other, their gestures so similar that it was easy to see Yin in my mother’s place in a couple of decades.

On the farm, my mother started going out on walks on her own, or going with Fong into town for longer and longer stretches, and her absences worried Yin. Where is she, how long will she be gone, what’s Dad doing? She would come and find me wherever I was to ask me these questions, even though she knew I couldn’t answer them. Whenever I walked past her room, I would see her reading my mother’s magazines the way she would have done at home. Only now our mother wasn’t around to offer input or laugh over photos they would pick out together.

Lina made an effort to take Yin out on walks to distract her, but these were not a success. Yin took badly to the heat and the mosquitoes, her skin welling up in angry red spots where she’d been bitten, but still Lina persisted. No point in hanging around the house waiting for mother dearest to come back, she told Yin, Mum’s a property owner now, she has responsibilities – she has a life.

‘I wish we could just go home,’ Yin complained, but she allowed Lina to take her further afield, and I would see them striding off in different directions, leaping across dry ditches or disappearing into the shade of the trees. I was glad that they didn’t invite me. When I wasn’t with Chuan I was waiting for him to return from his job in town; I didn’t want to be out when he came back. My days moulded to his, and I didn’t want this structure to be disturbed by anything.

*

One morning, Chuan and I arrived at the hangar to find it empty, and soon it became clear that the men were not going to come. At that time of the day the place was usually bright and noisy with the metallic clang of tools but today it felt like a museum, the tools undisturbed. Maybe they were anticipating the period of inactivity that would follow; maybe even inanimate objects could sense that Budi and Eka and the others would never return.

‘It’s always like that,’ Chuan said, shrugging. ‘They just disappear without warning.’

But there had been warning, I wanted to say; there had been plenty of time to see that things were not going well and that Fong should have been making more of an effort to find different kinds of work for the men – something more profitable, less harsh. ‘Couldn’t you help them out somehow?’ I asked.

Chuan shook his head. ‘You don’t understand how things are out here,’ he said sharply. ‘People come, people go. It’s not a drama. For you, maybe – not for us.’

‘But what’s happened to them? Aren’t you worried?’

Chuan looked at me as if he couldn’t comprehend what I’d asked, and just as I was about to repeat myself, he held up both hands, palms facing upwards – appealing to the heavens. ‘You gone crazy or what? What kind of universe do you live in?’

‘The same one as you. The one where people care about others.’

‘Let me ask you this: if every day you go to the market and there’s a guy sweeping the drains, and one day he’s not there, do you, what, worry about him?’

I nodded. ‘I would wonder, yes. I would wonder what he was doing, why he had to leave.’

‘I can tell you, he wouldn’t be wondering about you.’ He turned his head and spat on the ground. I had never seen him do that before, and I could tell it was intended to repulse me – to show me how different we were. ‘He wouldn’t give a fuck about you or your life.’

‘That’s not the point. The point is human empathy.’

He threw back his head and laughed – again, artificially, I thought; the sound that came out of his throat was hard and plasticky, as though he was imitating someone else. ‘Human empathy,’ he repeated in a high-pitched feminine voice. ‘You know, I chat to the people who come in every day to the 7-Eleven where I work. I know their lives, they know mine. But what really do I know about them, and what do they know about mine? We exchange pleasantries – hello, how are you, how’s your son, is your father okay and all that bullshit. The next day I get sacked, do you think they worry about me, or whether I’m getting paid on time, or my father’s problems with the bank?’

‘Your father has problems with the bank?’

‘People don’t give a fuck about other people, not in my universe at least. You guys have so much time on your hands, you can worry about – what was that? Human what?’

‘Empathy.’

‘If I spent all my time thinking about that, I wouldn’t have time for anything else. People come, people go. Like the rain. An hour after a downpour you don’t even see a puddle.’ He fumbled in his pocket for his cigarettes and found there was only one left in the pack. He put it between his lips and realised he didn’t have a lighter. I had one but didn’t offer it. Ever since we’d started going into town, I’d taken to buying my own Marlboros so that I could give Chuan one of mine from time to time. I liked the simple act of tapping the pack so that one or two cigarettes would pop out, which I’d then hold out to him; it felt as though we were equals. I put my hand in my pocket and felt the cheap plastic lighter and closed my fingers around it, but didn’t draw it out. He kept the cigarette between his lips.

‘That’s a dumb comparison,’ I said. ‘Raindrops don’t have lives. They don’t have emotions. They don’t hate other raindrops. They don’t go to school or work in factories. They don’t have mothers, fathers, lovers. They don’t long for another raindrop, they don’t have fun with their raindrop buddies. After a big storm they don’t say, hey, that was fun, let’s do it again. They don’t miss other raindrops. They don’t know how to.’

Chuan took the cigarette from his mouth and looked at it as though examining it for some minuscule defect. ‘People don’t miss other people,’ he said, more quietly now. ‘They don’t know how to either.’

All the time we had been speaking, the insects had been in full song, their loud hiss and crackle sounding almost electric, but now, abruptly, they fell silent. It was like this in the countryside, I was discovering: one moment the forest was raucous, the next it was completely mute, the passing from one state to another so absolute that at first I thought it was a function of my imagination, being febrile and apprehensive as I was to be in a new place, and then I assumed it was a problem with my hearing. I could never anticipate when the noise would start or end, or guess where its source lay. It was not connected to the changing of the light, or the presence of humans; and now the insects had simply fallen quiet, like us. I took my lighter from my pocket and went over to Chuan, flicking it to life and holding it out to him. He took a while to concentrate the tip of his cigarette in the centre of the flame, and I wasn’t sure which one of us was being unsteady.

I said, ‘If I went to the 7-Eleven every day and then one day, mysteriously, you weren’t there, I’d miss you.’

He drew slowly on his cigarette and I wished the insects would call again to encourage him to speak. In the distance we saw Fong walking with two other men towards the orchards. One of them was holding a clipboard and what looked like a small measuring instrument or camera on a tripod tucked under his arm. My father was not among them.

‘The old man wants to cut down all the trees. He says they’re all sick. He plans to dig everything up and put in a new irrigation system,’ Chuan said. ‘But he doesn’t have the money.’

‘Is that why he’s having problems with the bank?’

Chuan shrugged. ‘I guess so. He doesn’t tell me the details so I don’t know exactly. All I know is that those problems are his business. That’s why I need to get out of here.’

The men shielded their eyes from the sun and one of them held a folded newspaper over his head like a makeshift parasol. He was more smartly dressed than the others, in a short-sleeved shirt that looked pressed, and dark grey trousers – a sharp silhouette in the soft landscape around him.

‘You’d miss this place if you ever left,’ I said.

Chuan dropped his cigarette on the concrete floor and rubbed it out with his foot even though it was only half finished, which was unusual because he usually smoked them right to the end, taking tiny tokes even when I thought there wasn’t anything left to inhale. We took a brief look around us, at all the tools arranged neatly. It was clear that there was no more work left to do on the farm for the rest of the day, and for many days to come. ‘Let’s go to the lake,’ Chuan said.

As we left I kept waiting – hoping – for an answer. Then I realised that I hadn’t actually asked a question that needed a reply.

*

We were less than halfway to the lake when we saw Lina and Yin at the edge of an orchard, looking at something – an old motorbike covered in creepers, which rose from the ground. ‘It’s a work of art,’ Lina said when she saw us.

‘That piece of junk?’ Chuan laughed. ‘It was my father’s favourite for years, then he crashed it and refused to ride again.’ He touched the dent in the headlamp gently, as though remembering how it got there. I could see that it must once have been handsome; even rusty and bashed up, it retained its deep green paint and straight handlebars.

‘So there’s nothing wrong with it?’ Lina said.

Yin was tugging at the vines creeping over the bike, drawing them away in tangled strands. ‘It seems almost a shame to clean it up,’ Lina said. ‘But I’m going to give new life to it.’ She lifted her tiny camera to her eye and took a few shots of it, moving around to adjust her view. She never went anywhere without that camera, which had a lens that emerged from behind a pull-down flap like a cuckoo in a cuckoo clock springing out from its hatch. Ever since she’d started art school the previous year, she’d been going around taking photos of banal objects – in fact, the more uninteresting the better: tree stumps after a storm, plastic bags caught in barbed-wire fences, that kind of thing. Soon you’re going to be photographing rubbish dumps, my father had said. Good idea, I hadn’t thought of that, Lina retorted. He had refused to pay for her to go to art school on the grounds that it was a waste of time and wouldn’t lead to anything worthwhile. She was free to do what she wanted, and he was free not to support her choice – freedom works both ways, doesn’t it? But – my mother had protested – how is she going to live? It was a public university, it wasn’t expensive, but Lina still had to pay for meals and her room in the dormitory, it all added up. She worked in part-time jobs and didn’t say no when my mother gave her some money from time to time. She enjoyed being independent. It meant not having to answer to my father.

‘If you manage to make that work I’ll strip naked and run through town all day,’ Chuan said.

‘As if anyone wants to look at you,’ Lina said.

All four of us began to extricate the old Kawasaki, a task more difficult than we’d imagined. The vines had insinuated themselves into every crevice, twining around the spokes of the bike, and Chuan had to cut them loose with his penknife. Wasn’t it beautiful, Lina said – nature has reclaimed a man-made object and doesn’t want to let go. Jesus, you guys are weird, Chuan said. Why can’t you have normal interests like normal people? We laughed. Although we were all sweating, it seemed that the day was not so hot compared to recent ones. Occasionally a breeze drifted through the trees.

‘Who’s to say what’s normal?’ Lina said, gently unlacing some thin branches from the handlebars. ‘Maybe we are normal, and you’re not.’

‘No,’ Chuan replied, shaking his head. ‘You guys are definitely the weird ones.’

Yin’s phone was ringing in her pocket. She’d put it on silent mode but it was vibrating loudly against a coin, or a key, or something metallic, and we could hear it as clearly as an alarm bell. We ignored it the first time, and the second, and continued to talk – Chuan was telling us about how, as a small child, he would help his father clean the bike with a soft leather cloth, and when Fong started it up, the engine sounded like thunder, and when finally he was big enough to be allowed to ride with Fong, he clung on to his father as if he might fall off at any moment, and it was only much later that he learned they’d only been going at ten or twenty miles an hour. Isn’t it strange how a child’s mind works? We feel as though our entire world changes when we get older, every object, every person, has been rearranged into some strange new configuration, but in fact nothing at all has changed.

Yin’s phone buzzed again and this time she took it out, looked at it and turned it off.

‘Boyfriend?’ Chuan said, and Yin blushed.

‘It’s nothing,’ Lina said. ‘Just leave her alone.’

The thick cladding of vegetation had in fact preserved the bike. Its tyres had wasted away but we still managed to wheel it to the track. Lina wanted to take it to a garage in town that she’d seen the other day but Chuan persuaded her to wait a day or two. He knew a guy who worked there and could get her a discount on a big job like that, and besides, they’d need Fong’s lorry to transport it.

‘Why don’t you come to the lake with us?’ Chuan said. I felt resentful at this suggestion and, almost immediately, ashamed of being resentful. I felt myself blushing – afraid that my lack of enthusiasm would betray my desire to be alone with Chuan.

Lina looked at me and raised her eyebrows and I cast my gaze down at the long grass, kicking at it weakly. ‘Are you sure we won’t be disturbing you?’

Chuan groaned and started to walk away. ‘Don’t be so boring, just come.’

‘Yeah, come,’ I said, trying to sound bright but not too bright, and then I was anxious that in trying to strike a balance, I would sound awkward, as if I were trying to hide something, which I was. ‘We know a good spot to hang out.’

‘I bet you do,’ Lina said. She began to follow us. Yin trailed along behind, occasionally texting, but when she saw we were looking at her she put her phone away. She had met a boy, Lina said, lowering her voice confidentially, and it was serious. We couldn’t tell our parents, they wouldn’t approve. He was from a good family, much richer than ours – his father was an accountant, and his elder sister had been in Lina’s class at school. It’s just that he was, well, Malay. The modern kind, quite open-minded of course, but still, his parents were quite religious in the way that nice conservative people are when they’ve grown up in the countryside. Even though they moved to the city years earlier they were still quite old-fashioned. His dad had just been on the hajj to Mecca, and even though that wasn’t unusual, everyone did it these days, it was just – we all knew what our parents were like. They weren’t racist in real life, not in general – well, maybe a bit, but Lina could not see them taking well to this news.

‘I wouldn’t let my daughter marry a Muslim,’ Chuan said. ‘She’s his sweetheart now, but in ten years’ time she’ll just be one of four wives.’

‘Hello? Is anyone asking your opinion?’ Lina said. ‘It’s her choice, not yours. She might be the one who decides to take four husbands.’

‘I’m just sharing my views.’

‘You’re cuter when you don’t give your opinion.’ Anyway, Lina continued, personally she didn’t think it would last. She hoped it wouldn’t. Not because of the boy’s race or religion or social class – you know how snobby those rich Malays are, girl from a modest Chinese family won’t cut it with them – but because she believed that relationships shouldn’t be long term. All relationships, but especially those involving a man and a woman. Look at Mum and Dad. Did Yin really want to live her life like that, enslaved to an ungrateful husband and then to ungrateful children. Life as a woman was life without gratitude. And it’s all because people expect you to be in a relationship. You’re just the addendum, the necessary spare part. Everyone around you believes that, so you end up believing it yourself. The sooner Yin realised this, the better.

‘I don’t think your sister is capable of living out her life on her own,’ Chuan said, turning around to look at Yin, who was walking slowly with her phone in her hand, checking it every few seconds. ‘She’s not like you.’

‘She doesn’t have to be like me to realise that relationships suck,’ Lina replied. She hopped over to the edge of the path to pick up a length of wood she had spotted in the long grass, worn smooth and lean by time and the weather. She held it up to us like a sword for a second and began drawing lazy circles in the air in front of her with it as we walked. ‘The only way to love is to dip in and out of – let’s call them arrangements, let’s not even use the word “relationships”. And the moment you’re tired of an arrangement, you move on.’

‘That’s just a long-winded way of saying you don’t want to get married,’ Chuan laughed.

‘The problem isn’t marriage, it’s being expected to be with someone. To cede control of yourself and form a unit with them. But yeah, you’re right, marriage is a particular problem, especially for women.’ She feigned a thrust with her stick like a fencer lurching at an invisible foe.

The lake appeared in view but to get to it we had to descend into a slight dip in the land and cross the grove of tamarind trees that spread between us and the water. The path we were on had begun to dissipate into the undergrowth and it was at this point that we expected Chuan to push ahead and lead the way as he had done on our previous visit. He knew the route of least resistance and would lead us through the tangle. Instead, he stopped and turned to face Lina. ‘You’re crazy if you think you can live a life without responsibilities to anyone. If you don’t have responsibility, you don’t have love.’

Lina edged past him and slipped into the high grass, thrashing at it with her stick, but the grass merely swayed. In a voice like a Beijing opera singer’s, she sang the chorus from a popular Leslie Cheung song, the soundtrack to a film she had been watching, set in pre-Revolutionary China about an opera star who loved his co-actor who loved someone else. A man who loved a man who loved a woman. All of them knew who was in love with whom. Lina had got hold of a pirated VHS and watched it several times. No one I knew had seen the film, which had been banned, but we all knew the song, whose lyrics spoke of the inseparable nature of love and pain. Seek love and you will find hurt, the song proclaimed.

‘Who taught you such sentimental nonsense?’ she said, turning around with a flash of a smile. ‘Love should lead to freedom, not obligation – and certainly not suffering. Why can’t you escape your Chinese upbringing that teaches you to accept suffering as a by-product of everything pleasurable?’

‘Chuan is right,’ I ventured. ‘If you love someone you have to stick by them forever, right?’

Even though I couldn’t see her eyes from behind her sunglasses I knew she had widened them in mock surprise. ‘So says the child who’s had plenty of experience of love. One day you might stop parroting the crap you hear in American movies.’

‘I’m not a child.’

‘He has a point,’ Chuan added, walking next to me. ‘If you can walk away from anyone, what’s so valuable about a relationship?’

‘Hey, guys,’ Yin called. We turned around and saw that she had fallen even further behind, stepping gingerly through the grass and sometimes stumbling on the uneven ground. She clutched her mobile in one hand, holding it above her head, as though she feared sinking in the sea of foliage and wanted the phone to be the survivor in this green shipwreck. ‘It’s getting a bit late, don’t you think we should be going home?’

‘Just forget about home, no one cares about you there,’ Lina said as she turned and continued towards the lake. We weren’t far now, already in the shade of the trees. There was no breeze but the silty smell of the water carried faintly towards us.

‘Are you saying that you never want to commit to anyone?’

‘I’m saying I don’t want to have to be with someone forever.’

We had reached the low bank that sloped gently into the lake, where the ground was softer underfoot. We paused and looked at the water. Its perfect flatness made us fall silent. We kept waiting for something to break the surface but nothing did. Guys, wait, where are you, Yin called from far away, but none of us answered.

‘You think it’s not possible for you to be with anyone long term?’ Chuan said quietly, gazing out over the water, and I didn’t know if he meant to address the question to me or to Lina.

Lina shrugged. ‘Not with a man, in any case.’ She raised her stick and took a step back, then launched it like a javelin towards the middle of the lake. We watched it twist in the air and arc into the water with barely a splash. Then she kicked off her sneakers and took off her sunglasses and T-shirt, dropping everything into a messy pile. In her black bra and running shorts she looked strong and lithe, a person I didn’t recognise. How strange, I thought, that I had grown up with her, she had been there all my life, and after my mother she was the person I was closest to in the world, yet I hardly knew her. And at that moment I realised, also, that I would probably never be able to understand her. Whatever closeness we had experienced in our shared existence up to that point would not be enough to prevent our lives from pulling inevitably in opposite directions. She plunged smoothly into the lake with arms outstretched, head first, even though she could not have known what lay underwater.

Chuan followed swiftly, half leaping, half running into the shallows while whooping loudly. We paddled out towards the middle of the lake where the water was deepest, and took turns holding our breath to try to find the bottom with our feet. We went further with each dive, surfacing with a gasp and a laugh, but none of us managed to reach the depths.

‘Funny how the lake looks so much bigger when you’re out in the middle of it,’ Lina said. We were treading water and the sun was directly overhead. The light reflected off the ripples we had created and blinded us. We swam to the other bank, Lina arrowing ahead in a flawless front crawl, Chuan and I following in improvised breaststroke. When we reached the other side we turned and shouted for Yin to join us, but she held up her hand to signal that she didn’t want to. Come on, Lina shouted in a deep-throated voice that I’d never heard before, at once joyous and commanding, and all at once I remembered the swimming lessons we had as children. I, the smallest, had been holding on to the edge of a pool that couldn’t have been more than a few feet deep, but it felt that if I let go I would drown at once, and Yin was standing on the edge, refusing to come in despite the pleadings of the instructor, an imposing woman with greying hair. Lina, already able to swim, splashed back into the shallows and said to Yin, Get in, a command so terse it was impossible not to obey. That was less than ten years ago. Where would we be in ten years’ time?

Yin checked her phone one last time and placed it on the heap of clothes we’d left in the shade. She’d inherited our mother’s pale complexion, and didn’t want to be out in the sun for fear of getting a tan. Without undressing, she stepped gingerly into the shallows but slipped on the mud and fell in with a strangled cry. Chuan laughed.

‘You’re a disgusting boy,’ Lina said and shoved him, but she was laughing too as Yin stood up, wiping the water from her face. She waved to say she was all right and we started to swim back to join her. Let’s race! Chuan cried and we hurled ourselves through the water, kicking and thrashing wildly, feeling as if we were going nowhere. Sometimes we paused to breathe and shout something, even though we weren’t sure if any of us could hear each other; sometimes we swallowed water by mistake; sometimes we made strange noises, like imaginary birds or animals, just for the sake of hearing our own voices. Yin pushed out to join us as we approached, crouching neck deep in the water to keep cool. Tiny spots of mud and dead leaves clung to her face and hair, no matter how much she tried to wipe them off, and Lina told her she had to stick her head in the water and swim, there was no other way, so she did, she took a deep breath, closed her eyes and threw herself in, and it felt only natural that we should join her, diving in search of each other, hoping to grab an ankle or wrist, but finding no one in the murky gloom. When we surfaced we were each in a completely different spot from where we thought we would emerge, a haphazard rearrangement which we all found hilarious, so we repeated this disappearing game, plunging into the water again and again. In those moments, with the sun burning above us, we felt as though we could play that game all day, every day for the remainder of our youth. There were no rules, no winners or losers, no objective, and every match ended in laughter that we couldn’t explain.

‘I’m driving to the coast,’ my father said, already preparing to leave the house, without further explanation for his departure. The previous afternoon, my mother had come into my room, pausing at the door, at once distracted and focused, and sombre, as though about to deliver important news. She told me that my father would be spending the following day out, but hadn’t said anything more because there was no need to. We had both had a lifetime of his unpredictable behaviour; we were both used to his evenings spent at work or with friends; his outings were part of our daily routine. Yet this one felt unusual in its formality – in the simple fact that it was announced, and the fact that preparations were being made.

In a plastic bag my father had packed a bottle of water, a few small bananas, a pair of binoculars, a flat box of watercolours and two paintbrushes. I didn’t know how far away the coast was, or what might be there once he arrived.

‘Do you want me to go with you?’ I asked, but he shook his head and told me to stay and help Fong with whatever work he needed. I didn’t bother telling him that it had been a few days since there had been any work at all to do on the farm, and that Fong had been away a lot – surely my father had noticed that himself?

For as long as I could remember, I had always felt a great relief whenever my father was gone. I recalled the immense lightness I experienced when, at the age of nine or ten, I returned from school and saw an empty space where his car should have been parked. On other days, believing that I was familiar with his teaching timetable, I would look forward to the few hours of liberation at home when he had to work late, and was terrified when I walked up the lane and found the white Volvo in the small concrete yard in front of our house. I equated freedom with the absence of my father, and hated the erratic nature of his arrivals and departures. I could never explain the low dread that I felt when, reading in my room, I heard the sound of the car pulling up to the house. It always seemed to be evening when this occurred, sometimes long after the rest of us had finished dinner. We would have waited as long as we could for him to return before having something to eat so that we, the children, would have time to do our homework before bed, and meals in those circumstances were consumed quickly and in silence. My mother would be unusually tense on those evenings without my father, worried about his safety on the roads, and wondering if he hadn’t had an accident in the old Volvo. People drove so fast on all the new roads, those highways that cut right through town, linking the shiny new suburbs. My father often took the wrong turn and lost his way; sometimes he’d have to change lanes abruptly and angry youths would wind down their windows and shout. She was also concerned about his health, I guess, because he had started to develop some nagging problems, being nearly sixty. How weird, Lina had remarked not that long ago: both my father’s presence and his absence made our mother unhappy. Whatever anxiety my mother experienced when he wasn’t around, I (and I think my sisters) experienced the opposite – a quiet relief.

But now, as I watched him fumble with the plastic bag, I noticed that I was not relieved that he might be leaving us for a day, or perhaps even more, who knew? One side of the bag was catching on the strap of the binoculars and my father kept pulling at the binoculars weakly, without any effect. He looked so frail and old, and suddenly an image of him in ten or twenty years appeared before me. I saw us both standing in this same space; he would be fragile and lacking in coordination, struggling with a basic task like this one, only by then, it wouldn’t be an isolated occurrence but an everyday one.

I went over and helped him ease everything into the bag, arranging each object so that they lay as flat as possible. ‘Is that a new shirt?’ he asked, standing back and appraising me as though he hadn’t seen me in a very long time.

‘Yeah,’ I shrugged; it was the one that Chuan had bought for me, and I didn’t feel like offering a lengthy explanation. ‘I got it in the night market.’

‘That’s why it looks so cheap. That colour doesn’t suit you at all.’

I placed the bananas on top of the pile of things in the bag and carried it out. ‘All ready to go now.’ I walked him to the car and waited for him to get in. I put the bag on the passenger seat and took the bottle of water out, tucking it into the space between the seats where he could reach it. I reminded him to drink plenty of water because of the heat, which seemed worse than usual that day, but he had already started the engine and didn’t hear me.

‘What’s up with him?’ I asked my mother once he’d gone. We watched the plume of dust rise and dissipate over the track as he pulled out of sight.

‘He said he needed to be alone.’

‘Alone? For how long?’

She barked out a little laugh. ‘You know your father,’ she said, wiping the kitchen table clean even though it wasn’t dirty. ‘He has his moods. That’s where you get it from, I guess.’

‘I don’t have moods.’

She poured some hot water from the kettle into the half-empty cup of tea she’d been drinking from and sat down at the table, watching the leaves rise to the surface before settling again. He was having a difficult time at work, she explained. Someone at the college didn’t like him – the deputy director, who always felt guilty at having taken the job that should have been Dad’s. We all knew that Dad wasn’t the easiest person to work with, she continued, but he was good at his work. In that whole college there wasn’t anyone as bright as him, but nowadays in this country it seemed that wasn’t enough, in fact it counted against you. The deputy director had been harassing my father—

‘Harassing?’ I said. I found the idea of anyone harassing my father so remote and unreal that I couldn’t imagine how it would play out in real life.

Firstly, this guy kept changing Dad’s teaching schedule, giving him the lousiest lessons in the worst slots, often just after lunch break or late in the evening. That’s why he was sometimes so late coming home at night. It doesn’t sound like a lot to you, I know, my mother added, but for a brilliant man like your dad it’s tough. What’s more, the deputy director had invented some complaints against him – from students who wished to remain anonymous. Which students? Who are they exactly? My father had demanded to know. One day he stormed into the deputy director’s office and shouted exactly that. Who are these people, I want their names. Tell me what I have done. For that, he was given an official warning. So he went to the director himself. He was only asking, my mother said, he had a right to do so, but you know what these people are like, they hate you challenging their authority – this country has become so dictatorial.

The first accusation was one of bullying. One student said that my father had humiliated him in front of the whole class for not knowing an answer. My father didn’t see the problem. You come to college to learn, don’t you? If your teachers are soft on you, you don’t learn anything. But times had changed, the deputy director told him. There are rules now. You have to respect your students. Sure, we all knew that Dad was strict, but wasn’t that an advantage as a teacher?

The next accusation was that my father was often seen painting or drawing in the staffroom, the kind of watery Chinese landscapes he often did at home. The complainants were other teachers, who again remained anonymous. It wasn’t professional, they said, it gave the impression of laziness and set a bad example, especially since he was the head of the maths and science department. Laziness? Your father? (My mother’s voice was raised now, her throat constricted with anger.) Say anything you want, but not that. My father wrote a letter to the director, attaching the teachers’ rules of conduct. He hadn’t broken any rules. It was his free time. The college couldn’t provide any proof of wrongdoing – they didn’t want to release the names of the so-called complainants. The problem wasn’t my father’s behaviour, it was his race, my mother said. That has always been the problem. It’s painful to admit it, but it’s the truth.

My father demanded a meeting with both the deputy director and the director, but they insisted that he wasn’t being persecuted. He just had to stick to the rules and in a few years’ time he would have his pension. That was the week before term ended, just before we left to travel south.

‘Don’t tell Dad I told you,’ my mother said. She hadn’t drunk any of her tea. ‘He doesn’t want you to know. But I feel that you’re old enough to understand.’

I shrugged. ‘It’s not a big deal, is it?’ I asked. ‘Sounds like it’ll blow over soon.’

‘What do you mean it’s not a big deal?’ my mother shouted, her voice rising abruptly. ‘What happens if he loses his job?’

‘Can’t he get another one?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you always saying he’s over-qualified for his job? There’ll be another college somewhere that’ll take him on. Or a secondary school, even. Come and teach at mine. My maths teacher is useless.’

My mother got up and took her cup to the sink. She shook her head and looked at me with an expression of frustration, perhaps even regret. ‘Your father is not a young man.’ She picked up a large raffia bag and checked that her purse was in her handbag as she left the kitchen. She was already down the corridor when she turned to face me again. ‘At your age, you don’t understand these things.’

Through the glass slats of the window I watched her shield her face from the sun as she crossed the yard. She called out an indistinct word, just one bright syllable, and a moment later Fong emerged from the store-house and joined her in the yard, their movements linked by the sound of my mother’s voice as if choreographed. They made for the lorry but then paused briefly before Fong jogged back indoors to change the keys that he had been holding. They got into the car instead and drove away slowly. It was still early; the market would be in full flow when they arrived in town.

I found Lina and Yin in their room, sitting next to each other on one of the beds with their backs propped up against the wall and their knees raised. Yin’s eyes were red from crying and Lina had her arm around Yin’s shoulders. Lina shook her head when I came in the room to indicate that I shouldn’t ask anything. I told them that our father had gone to the coast and our mother to the market in town, and the news roused both of them. ‘How long will Mum be gone?’ Yin asked, her concern for our mother displacing her sulkiness.

‘I didn’t ask, she didn’t tell,’ I replied.

‘Let’s spend the day out too!’ Lina cried. She got up and dug around in her backpack for a map of the region. We calculated that it would take our father around forty-five minutes to drive to the coast. It wasn’t the longest of drives but not an easy one. The roads were narrow and the route difficult to navigate, and our father wasn’t comfortable at the wheel. He would be gone all day, we decided, and our mother would be out at least until lunchtime.

As we set out for the lake, I texted Chuan to let him know where we would be. He had worked the night shift at the 7-Eleven and would just have finished. He rang almost instantly to say that he was on his way and would be home soon. I could hear that he was on his scooter as he spoke, and was suddenly worried for his safety. I hadn’t cared about my father’s wellbeing but now I was concerned for Chuan’s. I told him to be careful but he’d already hung up.

I saw that Yin didn’t have her mobile with her. I’d noticed her placing it ceremoniously on her bedside table as we left the room, as if it were a once-precious relic that had outlived its usefulness. She told us that the boy she was going with had asked to take a break from their relationship, which Lina informed her was the equivalent of breaking up. Men were too cowardly to dump you; they would rather you made the decision so that they could spend the rest of their lives believing that they were the victims. So they engineered the situation to make it impossible for you to react in any other way but to separate. Lina was right, Yin said: if she thought back to all the little incidents that filled their brief but important relationship – It wasn’t important, Lina interjected, it just felt that way – it was true that there had been so many instances in which she’d felt that he had already decided on the outcome of a particular course of events, yet it was she who’d had to make the final decision, which never felt right. The choice of restaurants, which friends to hang out with at the weekend, which movie to go and see. Now she was finally beginning to understand.

‘What if he really just means what he says?’ I asked. ‘Maybe he literally wants to take a break because – I don’t know why – to think about whether you and he are heading in the right direction? He might reflect on things and come back even more convinced that you’re the one for him.’

Lina let out a long, rasping groan. ‘Oh my God.’ She slapped her palm on her forehead and then pretended to knock her head with her fist. ‘What a naïve child.’

We heard Chuan’s scooter approaching, its motor whining with the effort of alternately accelerating and braking along the stony path. He wanted to show us a place he knew, just beyond the furthest limits of the farm – his special place, he said, that no one else knew about. He got the keys for Fong’s scooter and gave them to Lina, who took Yin, while I rode with Chuan. We headed in the direction of the lake but peeled off halfway down the track and took a route that led out of the farm. The surface must once have been tarmacked but was now as uneven as the dirt track we had just left, the remaining patches of bitumen acting as natural speedbumps that jolted us out of our seats. But even the discomfort didn’t discourage us, in fact the opposite was true – we found the newness of the setting amusing, even exhilarating. The first time we went over a hump, Yin let out a strangled yelp, an involuntary noise that sounded so strange that it surprised her and made her laugh, and though each subsequent bump was no longer a shock, she made the same noise, exaggerated, to entertain us. Instead of slowing down when they saw an undulation in the road, Lina and Chuan sped up to intensify the impact and didn’t restrain themselves even when the risk of becoming unbalanced became real, and we lurched from side to side. I had to hang on tightly to Chuan, holding him closely and whooping my approval, encouraging his recklessness. The road flattened out slightly and Lina and Yin, who had been behind us, accelerated and drew abreast of us, then Lina put her head down and narrowed her elbows in imitation of a professional racer and pulled ahead. Yin sat upright, her hair, usually so immaculately brushed it seemed never to move, fluttering haphazardly in the wind. For many years afterwards, every time I got news of her – her marriage, children, homes – it was this image of her that would come to my mind, and I would think how differently life had turned out for her.

‘You’re kidding me, right?’ Chuan said, when we paused under some trees. He was slightly breathless and I couldn’t tell if it was from excitement or from the effort of the ride. ‘That’s the first time you’ve ever been on a scooter?’

Yin nodded as she gathered her hair into a ponytail. She wanted to tie it but couldn’t find her hairband.

‘Just your luck that you found the craziest bike-rider in the world for your first experience.’

I agreed with Chuan. It was like mounting a horse for the very first time and they give you a rodeo stallion. They laughed, and I said I was surprised – I didn’t know how she had learned to ride a scooter like that.

‘The parents will kill us if they find out we’ve been on scooters without a helmet,’ Yin said.

‘Who’s going to tell them?’ Lina said as we followed Chuan off the road and into the long grass where there were no paths. The land dipped before rising again in the distance, and we found ourselves walking in a shallow basin ringed by trees. The land we were currently walking on had once been part of the property, Chuan explained, but was sold some years ago when he was young – he was still in primary school, so maybe nine, ten years ago. His father had needed money as usual, and had sold a parcel of land. It was a regular occurrence: every so often a part of the farm would be sold, a piece of its outer edges, probably not for very much money, because although the earth was considered fertile in these parts, it was hard to run an agricultural concern of any sort. The people who bought the land were usually Chinese, and Chuan suspected that his father had run up gambling debts or lost some money to these men in mah-jong, but when he saw how worthless these small plots of land were, he realised that they were acquiring the land merely symbolically, so that they could feel as if they were landowners. They could own a piece of this country. Its soil, its water. He even remembered someone, a very old man, walking on an overgrown field that he had just bought from Fong: I arrived from Fujian province with nothing, he’d said, but now I own this land, I can pass it on to my grandchildren. And Chuan had thought, you foolish old man, your grandchildren are not going to want this lousy little field in the middle of nowhere, they want an apartment in the city! So the land that was sold often turned into this – he gestured around him – a quiet no man’s land that no longer belonged to Fong, but was of no use to anyone else.

‘The fuck is that?’ Lina said. We had reached the crest of the low hill and were about to descend into another shallow valley. The elevation had brought into view a construction site of half-finished houses arranged in neat rows, each consisting of maybe twenty single-storey houses sitting in what would, one day, be their own garden, but which for now were just squares of sand and dry soil. There were about eight lines of houses, whose structures were complete but missing a roof, and the windows were glassless openings cut into the concrete blocks. The area had been cleared of all its trees; the houses sat in a depression of red earth that glowed angrily against the dull green backdrop of the forest. It wasn’t unusual to see this kind of development; the countryside was littered with them, sprouting randomly in the unlikeliest of locations. We were not surprised by its existence, but by our ignorance of its existence. We had spent two weeks on the farm and had forgotten that human life lay just beyond its boundaries.

It’s holiday chalets, Chuan shrugged as he carried on walking. It was as if he had just seen some rocks or fallen trees, some feature of the landscape. That land used to belong to the farm too, he explained, and Fong had sold it to a property developer who wanted to build places for Singaporeans to escape for weekends and school vacations. We were so close to the border, less than an hour and a half away, and you know how rich Singaporeans are, they have cash to burn. It was going to have been called Something Villas – Tivoli Villas, that’s it – and it looked great in the advertising flyers. Fong had thought maybe it would somehow improve business. But then we had the crisis earlier that year, and no one had any money, not even property companies, and construction had stopped. He didn’t think it would ever start again. It had been months since he’d seen anyone working there, and anyway the whole country was full of unfinished developments like that. Reality couldn’t keep up with our dreams, he laughed.

‘Why do people do that,’ Lina grumbled as we walked through the grass. ‘All that destruction of forests and digging up of earth for shitty houses for the middle classes to take their holidays – and they can’t even finish what they started?’

Chuan stopped to look up. Clouds had built up that morning, not the thick billowing rainclouds that usually hung low overhead at this time of the year, announcing yet another deluge, but lighter ones, stretched across the sky like patchwork, stained with grey that suggested precipitation.

‘You think it’ll rain?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

‘It’s a disgrace,’ Lina continued, talking to no one in particular.

‘It’s just some houses,’ Chuan said. ‘People need to live somewhere. Or go on vacation. You’re making a big deal about nothing.’

‘Bulldozing forests just so that rich people can go on vacation is not nothing. We have the most ancient jungles in the world, older than the Amazon, older than anywhere else on the planet, and we cut them down to build, what, Tivoli Villas? The fuck.’

Chuan sighed. ‘What’s the point of fighting if the fight is already over? No one cares about us. We’re a small country, we’re not Brazil. The world wants brand-name causes. The Amazon is a brand. We’re not sexy. We’re invisible.’

‘But we exist,’ Yin said, quickening her step to walk abreast of Lina.

We’d reached the foot of the low hill, and Chuan broke into a little jog, forging ahead of us and suddenly vanishing. He had dropped into a dip that had been cut into the land so artfully that we couldn’t see it until we were standing on the edge of the fall, which was disguised by the foliage that shrouded it. Chuan beckoned us down and we found him at the entrance of what looked to be a cave. It must have been an old war hideout, Chuan explained as we crawled inside, the narrow entrance giving way to a wider space held up by wooden beams and pillars. There wasn’t enough space to stand so we knelt on the dirt floor as our eyes adjusted to the dark. The shelter extended twenty or thirty feet either side of where we were, Chuan said. He’d come across it years earlier when he was a child, when he had nothing to do but wander. Fong was always at work and there was no one else around to look after him, unlike most other country families, which always seemed to have a network of aunts and uncles and distant cousins living in the vicinity. It wasn’t the same for him, but he didn’t long for that kind of family life. He’d always enjoyed solitude. He enjoyed the freedom that comes from neglect. He had sometimes heard people accuse Fong of not taking care of him. Our mother, for one – he could remember her saying so, years ago, as a form of reprimand; and he had hated this reproach of his father, not because he wanted to defend Fong, or that he thought Fong was a good parent, but because he wanted to hang on to his freedom. He didn’t go to school if he didn’t want to, he stayed outdoors all day if he wanted to. No one ever supervised him, and when he saw the way other parents looked after their children, he recoiled from it. He didn’t even miss having a mother – his had left him soon after he had been born – because a mother represented supervision. Maybe he was like his father after all. Two men so used to solitude that they couldn’t get along with anyone else. Not even each other.

One day he came across this shelter and thought an animal lived in it. He was too scared to enter. He came back with a torch and saw that it was just an empty space that nothing had occupied for years, and at the far end of the cave he’d found biscuit tins that hadn’t been opened. He remembered his father and other locals speaking about the Chinese communists who’d lived on the edge of the jungle for years; some of them must have built the hideout, which was too well camouflaged to have occurred naturally. That was also why he felt instantly at home here. It was a place built by people who didn’t fit in elsewhere.

When he stopped talking we crouched in the dark and listened to the silence. There wasn’t much space and we were huddled close to each other. My thigh was pressed against Chuan’s, his skin damp against mine. I felt his hand reach for my knee and come to rest there; I placed mine on top of his. It felt as though I could hear my heartbeat.

‘Is it safe here?’ Yin whispered. ‘It feels as though the whole ceiling is going to collapse.’

‘Imagine if that happened and we just disappeared under the earth,’ Lina said. ‘No one would know we were here. No one knows this place even exists, so how would they find us?’

‘Don’t say that, just shut up,’ Yin mumbled. We didn’t know why we were whispering; there was no one else around, but the noise we made in the gloom seemed to be somehow disrespectful.

‘I wonder if anyone ever died in here,’ Lina said, and we all giggled, except Yin, who let out a cry of frustration and tried to smack Lina but missed. Chuan moved his hand and stretched his fingers, inviting me to interlace mine within them. We talked in hushed tones about how it must have felt to be a semi-fugitive, being on the margins. Some of the people who hid in this place would have had boring lives – shopkeepers, journalists, mechanics – but lived in fear of being unmasked as communists. His hand felt sticky and warm and hard. How long could you keep your secret? One day you have an ordinary family life, next day you’re on the run, hiding in a cave, eating tins of biscuits. Chuan untangled his fingers from mine and curled them around my ankle, squeezing it gently. Imagine a world where to survive means being invisible. When you got bored of biscuits, would you eat insects, just for a change?

‘This is such a horrible conversation,’ Yin said.

‘We’re just kidding, sorry,’ Lina said but Yin had already begun to crawl towards the light. We followed her and when we were upright again, squinting in the light, we saw that she had been crying. We stood looking at the land around us and for a while it seemed as though not a single leaf or blade of grass was moving. I longed for a ripple of wind but there was none; the clouds overhead were perfectly still, as though stunned by the heat. Sometimes I feel as though this place is not real, Chuan said in the soft tones that we’d been using in the war shelter, barely audible. We thought maybe he was talking to himself.

‘We’d better head home now,’ Lina said. ‘To avoid any further drama for Mother dearest. She’s probably still upset from arguing with Jack Lim.’

‘You think they’ve been arguing again?’ Yin said. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

‘Of course. Why else would he have escaped to the coast for the day? Let’s go. She’ll feel better with us around.’

‘Poor Mum,’ Yin said, frowning with worry.

She and Yin turned to walk back up the slope but Chuan and I remained where we were. ‘You’re not coming?’ Lina turned around.

‘I think we’re going to walk to the lake and hang out there,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel ready to go home yet.’

Lina shrugged. ‘You’re crazy to do it in this heat, but – whatever.’

We watched them walk slowly up the hill. Lina took a red bandana out of her pocket and gave it to Yin, who draped it over the top of her head, pinching it tight under her chin – a square of colour in the bleached landscape.

‘Come on,’ Chuan said. We started to walk towards the tall trees in the distance. The sun was at its fiercest, making the land shimmer uncertainly before us. I led the way. The long coarse grass slashed at my calves but I had become accustomed to the pain, barely recognised it as such. Strange, I thought, my body has adapted to the landscape – succumbed to it. The air was so hot and dry it singed my throat when I breathed.

‘Light a match and the whole country could go up in flames,’ I said.

Sui walks through the house, pausing as she enters each room. Sometimes she touches a piece of furniture – the chipped edge of a table or the fraying strands of a rattan chair – as if the brief physical contact with each of these objects is capable of reminding her of the first time she came here, more than twenty years ago; capable of summoning the feeling she had upon stepping into the house – tranquillity and excitement in equal measure; familiarity and exoticism; optimism.

At the time, her father-in-law-to-be (the wedding was only a few weeks away) had shown her around the farm while Jack stayed back in the house to catch up on some work. Away from the city, the old man was steadier on his feet and unusually talkative. He was already in his seventies, his health was declining and back in the city she had come to think of him as someone taciturn and overshadowed by a younger, more energetic wife. No one understands, he told Sui, no one understands why I am attached to this place. It is not profitable, it is not in a famous part of the country, it is not special, but it is mine. It is ours – for my children and grandchildren. My wife wants me to sell it and buy one of those new apartments in town, but that’s not the same. No one understands.

I do, Sui said.

I arrived in this country as a teenager with no money in my pockets, he went on to tell her – but Sui already knew what he was going to say, she had heard it so many times before, the reasoning of penniless migrants whose every act was explained by their pennilessness. Whether to spend money, save money, eat, not eat, be happy, be sad – everything was traced back to their arrival in their new country with nothing to their name. He told her about his childhood back in China, the rains and floods during each typhoon season in Guangdong province, the landslides, the dislocation, his family always moving from one place to another when their flimsy home was washed away and they had to start again from scratch. One day, he’d thought back then, one day I will own a piece of this earth, somewhere in the world, and never have to move again, I will die there and my bones will sink into the soil and I will become part of what belongs to me. He’d bought this land a few months before the end of the war for very little money because it was remote. He didn’t know what to do with it, except to possess it. Sui didn’t interrupt him. She knew that his ownership of the land was symbolic, financially unsound, illogical. He didn’t need to say any more.

Everyone thinks I’m mad, he said.

She paused and looked at the land spreading around her. I like mad people, she said. There aren’t enough of them in the world.

Soon, when I die—

Please don’t—

This place will belong to my son – to both of you.

She told Jack what his father had said later, when Jack had taken her for a walk to see the lake at the far end of the farm. He laughed and said, As soon as it’s mine, I’m going to sell it. She was suddenly filled with something that felt like panic, the fear of impending loss, even though she possessed nothing and was therefore incapable of losing anything. You can’t do that, she said. It’s your legacy – our children’s legacy. We could raise our kids here. They paused in the grove of old tamarind trees before they reached the water. He came close to her, touched her belly softly and kissed her cheek, allowing his lips to rest on her face.

You’re crazy, he murmured, his lips tickling her skin.

That’s why you love me, she replied. The canopy of trees spread like fine lace above her, filtering the light that fell to the forest floor. She stretched out her hand and looked at the intricate patterns of the shadows on her skin.

He took a notebook from his pocket and made a quick pencil sketch of her with the indistinct shape of a tree in the background. It was the most beautiful image she had ever seen.

Their first home was exactly as she had imagined it, a recently built single-storey house in a row of identical houses in a grid of numbered streets. Until recently the area had been a jungle. Occasionally there were still snakes in the drains, bright green vipers that came back in search of their old habitat, but otherwise the neighbourhood was clean, well lit and safe. She found it comforting to be hemmed in by other houses, the sound of radios and voices drifting across the neat concrete front yards filled with plant pots. Even the late-night arguments that sometimes broke out seemed to reassure her. She lived in the capital now.

Not long after they moved in, their first child was born and, as Jack had promised, they moved to a bigger place in a newer development, a two-storey house in the middle of a long line, overlooking the edge of a field where a children’s playground had been built. She would stand at the window of her bedroom looking at the kids on the brightly coloured swings and see-saws, all of which were fashioned from plastic into the shape of animals with maniacally happy faces – a dolphin grinning toothily at her, a panther with voluptuous painted lips, a puppy with close-set eyes and a smile that made it seem as though it was bewildered by all the other animals around it, constantly spinning and tipping over, and slowly going mad.

It was about this time that Sui also thought she was going mad. She had a baby that spent most of her time asleep, a husband who spent most of his time at work, a comfortable, modern house, spacious enough to accommodate her plans for a bigger family; she should have been keeping herself busy cleaning the house, making sure the plates were stacked in neat piles in the kitchen according to their size and pattern (she’d bought a selection with Jack from a new department store that had opened downtown), organising a selection of snacks for her husband for when he returned from work, driving to the plant nursery to buy shrubs and orchids to decorate the front yard with – all the things she knew were expected of her. But instead she spent far longer than she should have staring out of the window at those macabre smiling animals, feeling more and more detached from the objects that filled her new home, losing interest in them even though they had just been acquired – the black-and-white TV with its smart mustard-yellow casing, the settee covered in red plastic creased and grained to resemble leather, the Chinese rug and the glass-topped coffee table: she had chosen all of them, had bought them enthusiastically but now felt dissociated from them. She noticed the dust accumulating on and around these gorgeous possessions but couldn’t bring herself to clean or sweep up. It would have been so simple to have just fetched the mop or a damp cloth and done a bit of tidying up. How long would it have taken her – fifteen, thirty minutes? As the dirt gathered, so did her lassitude. Her inaction grew with every comment Jack made about the cleanliness of the house. She was caught in a trap of her own making, she knew, but couldn’t quite break out of it. Maybe she didn’t want to.

What would happen, she asked herself, hoping to shock herself into some kind of reaction: what would happen if these beautiful, expensive belongings were suddenly taken away from her and she was left with nothing, returned to the position she had only recently been in, that of a struggling daughter of a vegetable farmer? Would she regret her inaction then, her inability to play the role of the aspiring middle-class housewife she now was? She tried not to panic when she realised her answer to these questions was ‘no’. She felt nothing at the thought of losing her new possessions, this whole new life that she had fortuitously acquired.

Her baby. Now here was a problem. Sui knew that she would grow to love this soft, pale bundle of flesh, so warm and reassuring when she held it in her arms, but where was the overwhelming sense of sacrifice that she knew she was supposed to feel – that instinct that other women spoke about, of knowing that they would give up everything they owned, their very lives even, to preserve the joy and safety of their children? Sui did not experience this wave of natural maternal love; hers was something she would have to work at. The most disconcerting thing was that in some ways, she felt her baby had already begun to figure out how to survive in the world without her and would flourish more than she ever would. She, the baby, stared unblinking at Sui from the very moment she was born, her gaze steady and calm, taking in every detail; and in the baby’s regard, Sui felt as though she were being assessed, and deemed in some minuscule yet discernible manner already to be lacking – incapable of being the mother she should be. When the baby slept in her cot, Sui would stretch out on the bed next to it and, before dozing off, whisper to herself: please don’t let me fail my baby.

Months would pass and she would recover from this period of dreadful lethargy, this stoic refusal to inhabit the life that had become hers. She would learn to cook meals that were more interesting and varied, even if never elaborate; she would learn to iron the collars on Jack’s shirts the way he liked, and to supervise the Indonesian girl that she hired – of her own accord, through friends in the neighbourhood – to help with the cleaning two mornings a week; she would find herself laughing with the children (there were two now, in what seemed like no time at all) as she chased them around the small yard, or played hide-and-seek in the living room. She would slip into a routine without even knowing it, until her days were too busy and full of noise and chores for her to have any time to herself, and she discovered that her exhaustion was a source of satisfaction to her; proof of whatever strange notion of success she was supposed to have achieved as a wife and mother. But she would never totally lose this urge to swim against the tide, this sensation of walking away from everything without any remorse or regret or even mere upset. The impulse would come back to her from time to time – when driving along the Federal Highway on the way to collect the kids from school, for example, or doing the grocery shopping at Teng’s. What if she drove straight along the highway, skipping the exit that led to the school, or abandoned her basket of tinned sardines and sliced white bread at the checkout? She imagined how little she would care about being stripped of her status as the wife of Jack Lim, mother to his three handsome children (yes, now there were three). It would be so easy just to disappear.

This is one of those moments, she thinks, when that feeling comes back to her. From the upstairs window, on the landing between her bedroom and her daughters’, she watches Jack as he paints his little watercolours. He has set up a table under a makeshift parasol on the lawn in front of the house. She can’t quite see his head, which is obscured by the umbrella that he has mounted to a pole stabbed into the hard soil. It is tilted at an angle and doesn’t provide him with much shade. He has been there since shortly after dawn and the sun has shifted since then. She used to admire these paintings, blurry and engaging landscapes that he called impressionist, until she realised that Lina’s artwork at the age of thirteen was far superior to his, the confidence of her brushwork and use of colours making his seem like a muddling pastime, which is exactly what it was. His love of art had once seemed magnificent; now it merely magnified the waning of his powers. It would be so easy for her to leave him. She could take Fong’s car and drive off somewhere, anywhere. Jack couldn’t stop her. He is an ageing man who is feeling rudderless because he has just lost his job, and will likely never work again.

Yes, he lost his job, and for the time being wants to keep it secret. He hasn’t told the children, not on the grounds that he is ashamed, but because – he says – he might get it back, even though he and Sui both know this is improbable. The college delivered the news on the final day of term, just before the family was due to leave for the south. The school’s registrar called Jack into his office and said that the government was cutting funding to institutions like theirs. He regretted losing Jack, but it would be better if he didn’t return after the holidays for the start of the new term. There had been a few complaints about him, nothing too serious, but in view of his age – he was, in theory, past retirement age – the best solution for everyone was for him to leave quietly. Didn’t he want to take time off to enjoy life, play some golf, catch up with friends? It was called voluntary retirement; he wasn’t being sacked.

He has told her he will be going to the coast to do some painting later today. He needs some space to think, alone. He has to figure out what to do with the future, what kind of job he can get. There was a time not so long ago that she would have understood he was seeing someone else, his closed face and monosyllabic replies constituting a defence against further questioning. But today she knows that his outing is what he says it is: a time of peace for a man trying not to be crushed by life. She is glad he has decided to spend some time away.

On the other side of the house she can see Fong ferrying bags of something that looks like cement, between the lorry and the store-house; they are obviously heavy. He has promised Sui that he will take her to the market in town. They are running low on food and have to stock up on provisions for the rest of their stay. How much longer will you be here for? he asked yesterday. She paused before replying. Who knows, maybe forever, she thought, but eventually replied, Another week or two.

She goes downstairs and tidies up in the kitchen, even though there is not much to do. The dishes have been stacked in neat piles and the floor swept clean. She starts to cross the yard to look for Fong, to let him know that she’s ready to go, just as soon as she packs some food for Jack’s day out and makes sure the children are content doing whatever they’re doing – which is what, exactly? She has barely seen them over the last few days. Here is Jay, emerging from the house to see who is around. Even though he pretends not to see her, Sui knows that he has clocked her walking across the yard. He watches her, always observing. Sometimes she thinks that is the way he survives, by observing every situation so that he stays out of trouble. (She wonders, also, whether he guesses what she is thinking.) Lina and Yin will emerge later and slip out of the house without saying good morning or asking how Sui is – perhaps they don’t want to know.

Maybe it is a trick of the light out here in the countryside, but her children now have begun to look foreign to her, adults with whom she is acquainted but sees only occasionally. They move in unfamiliar ways, employ vocabulary that she doesn’t recognise. She no longer knows what they are thinking.

What would life on the farm be like, were she to live here? Would she be swapping one trap for another? Fong emerges from the store-house, limping. He raises his hand in greeting and walks towards her.

Life on the farm, dying and unprofitable though it might be, would be just fine. She would adapt to it in the same way she has adapted to everything. She remembers how she felt when she first came here, that vague sensation of euphoria that she now realises was a kind of control, of dominion. She might never truly belong to this land, but it belonged to her now.

Do you have a cold-box for all the meat and fish we’re going to buy? she asks Fong. I’m worried about it spoiling.

He shakes his head. How much are you planning to buy? He laughs. It’s not as if you’re staying forever.

Who knows, she says, trying to keep her voice light. Maybe I will. You might regret it then.

It’ll probably be you who regrets it, he answers in the same breezy tone.

We left the house at night, once we were sure that Fong and my parents had gone to bed. It wasn’t as if we were breaking the rules – we didn’t have a curfew. Since my father’s return from the coast, the house had seemed quieter, and my mother made an effort to follow him every time he withdrew into their room. Mealtimes, which until then had represented the final formal structure to our family life, had become flexible affairs. Whenever Chuan and I arrived too late for dinner, we would find some food left out – often not enough for the both of us, which gave us an excuse to leave again. Lina and Yin would sit on the veranda, reading or texting their friends, politely refusing our half-hearted invitations to join us. They’d make sandwiches with the loaf of cheap white bread that Fong had bought, and spread them thickly with jam or kaya and margarine, or the peanut butter that Yin asked Chuan to bring back from the 7-Eleven. He also bought them bottles of Pepsi or Fanta, which they would drink together with their makeshift dinners. Sometimes one of them would make instant noodles which they would eat on the veranda, even while my parents and Fong were eating dinner inside. I could never be sure who I’d find at the table in the kitchen – sometimes all three adults, sometimes Fong and either my mother or father, sometimes just one of them. Isn’t it interesting, Lina said, that given our age, we still refer to them as the adults. It must be our upbringing.

My parents and Fong would have heard the scooter starting up and pulling away from their bedrooms – how could they not? – but made no attempt to stop us from leaving, and made no comment the following morning. It was as if in that hot country air, whatever glue had held us together had melted away, leaving us free to fall apart.

Chuan and I decided to go to Jessie’s apartment in town. She wasn’t around and wasn’t answering Chuan’s texts, but he said it was fine, she often went silent for a day or two; he had the keys and often used the place for himself. He wanted to shower the moment we arrived – he didn’t like being sweaty, I knew that by now; he would take a quick wash even after the slightest exertion on the farm. I thought it might have been an invitation to a prelude, and that we would shower together, but he closed the door to the bathroom behind him. He took much longer than I thought he would, and I sat on the bed under the harsh ceiling light thinking maybe he’d changed his mind, maybe he’d decided this was all a mistake and I wasn’t good enough for him – I was too young, I didn’t know enough about the world, didn’t know how to initiate sex. When he came out he had a towel around his waist and said, Your turn now, and I showered as quickly as I could. He had turned out the light and the room was dark, lit only by the lights of the town coming through the half-open windows.

He said, I want to be clean for you.

Our nights were long and there was no longer any need to go back to the farm if we didn’t want to. Chuan taught me how to ride his scooter, which didn’t seem hard. I’d spent so much time as his passenger, clinging on to him tightly, that the balance and the rhythms of the scooter were already familiar to me. We rode up and down the straight narrow lane outside Jessie’s apartment late one afternoon, turning sharply each time we reached the end, and crouching low over the handlebars. Occasionally a car would come along in the opposite direction but we wouldn’t slow down, and the scowls of the irritated drivers made us laugh.

‘Why do I need to learn to ride?’ I joked. ‘I prefer being your passenger.’

‘Just in case I drink too much,’ he replied matter-of-factly. ‘Or if something happens to me. And anyway, you need to know how to ride a scooter for when – when you’re back home and I’m not around.’

I didn’t reply. The idea of being back in the capital and riding a scooter on my own seemed so preposterous – we were so far from the city, the deadening streets of the suburbs, the buses stuck in traffic on the way to class – even though I knew that the new year would arrive soon enough.

‘Let’s go for a long ride,’ Chuan said. ‘There’s a place I want to show you.’

I protested when he said he wanted to take me to Johor Bahru, which he called the city, about three quarters of an hour away. It was an ugly place, its messy sprawl of featureless roads lined with cheap shops that catered to Singaporean day-trippers who’d drive across the border to do their grocery shopping and fill up with cheap petrol. Can you imagine how it must feel to live in that city, I joked, and to have to look at the gleaming skyscrapers of Singapore across that narrow stretch of sea every day. Your whole life would be filled with a longing to be somewhere else – an impression that real life was within touching distance, yet always out of reach.

‘Some people are cool with living in a dump, you know. Not everyone is unhappy with their lives,’ Chuan said as we put on our helmets. Dusk was falling and the evening sky behind him was flecked with bats and swifts returning from the river nearby.

‘Or maybe they are unhappy, but they don’t realise it.’

He laughed and smacked me lightly on my helmet as I fastened it under my chin. He handed me the key. ‘You’re the boss tonight.’

The road was wide and fast, and heavy with traffic heading to the city. Lorries carrying cargoes of palm-oil seeds and livestock and refrigerated containers passed within arm’s length but I remained curiously unafraid, I had Chuan pressed close behind me, the warmth of his body. The surface was surprisingly smooth, unlike on the road that led back to the farm, which was scarred by potholes carved out by the rain. I went slowly, partly out of caution but also because I wanted the moment to last as long as possible. Chuan kept his hands on my waist, occasionally sliding them down to my thighs, and he hooked his thumbs in the folds of my pockets, joining us together in some small but symbolic way. I accelerated slightly, and now that the oncoming cars had their headlights on I would occasionally be blinded for a second or two. I wanted to hold on to that moment but already felt myself parting with it.

Don’t be foolish, I told myself, you’re young, there’s plenty of time, there will be other men on other roads heading to other towns, and by then this moment – this evening on a dangerous road heading to a nondescript border city – will no longer be remarkable, you will barely remember it. That was how memory worked; it was the opposite of recollection, never as strong as we thought it was, always relinquishing the instances that mattered most to us. When I asked my mother how she met my father, what he’d been like when they’d first met, she said she couldn’t really remember, she had to force herself to recall the details when she told me about them, and I could tell that the struggle was genuine. She had wanted the past to remain where it was, it was safer that way, and I thought that maybe I would be the same, I would move on and constantly relegate my past to a distant place of safety. For so long I had wanted to escape my family and become an adult, with full control over the way I lived, but now I feared that this instinct had become so strong that I would try to flee from every person I became close to, until the escape itself was the only thing that would satisfy me, and flight became my way of life.

Chuan put his arms around me, just below my chest so that they encircled my ribcage, and laced his fingers to squeeze me gently towards him, anchoring me; and I felt as though I were being held in one place, even though we were speeding down the road, and I began to feel that maybe this was where I belonged, in this patchwork of small towns and country roads; this place could contain me.

We dipped briefly into the city but then took a different route that led away from the centre, to a commercial zone made up of a series of malls and car parks. Chuan directed me to the end of a lane where most of the shops were closed, apart from a bar whose entrance was a steel frame lit by blue bulbs. There were some people smoking at the tables and chairs outside, young people more smartly dressed than we were, in clothes that suggested they worked in professional jobs. When we approached, they looked at us and one or two of them turned to their companions and whispered something, smiling as though they knew something we didn’t. I felt myself blushing – I wasn’t used to being stared at in this way – and tried to keep close to Chuan. ‘We look like farmworkers,’ I said. He held my arm as we walked past the tables and headed to the door. ‘That’s what we are,’ he laughed.

I had heard only a dull thump of bass from the outside, and hadn’t guessed how loud the music would be once we got in. The space was cramped, the dozen or so tables already occupied by groups of men and women, and we had to navigate our way to the small bar where we could perch and observe the room. Chuan ordered some beers and we stood looking at the various people, who mostly didn’t seem to notice us, although occasionally someone would catch my eye and smile, and I would look away, unsure of how to respond. One man winked at me and I felt my face redden with embarrassment. Chuan raised his bottle to someone at the far end of the bar and mouthed something I couldn’t make out. I asked him if he knew many people here, but he couldn’t hear me over the music. He put his hand on the back of my neck and drew my head close to his ear so that he could hear me, and when he replied, No, I don’t come here that often, his lips were so close to my ear that they grazed my skin. I was glad that the music was so loud because it drew us together.

At some point the music stopped and someone took the microphone to announce the weekly karaoke contest. People came up to the microphone at the far end of the bar and sang Cantonese ballads. The TV screens that played the lyrics showed films of young women strolling wistfully through parks with lakes and gardens in the background, or scenes of deer running through mountains, which largely had no connection to the songs and made us laugh because they were so random. Everyone in the bar knew most of the songs, and joined in each chorus, and after a while so did we, our voices drowned out by the others even though we were singing as loudly as we could. I can feel your voice, Chuan said. He’d kept his arm around my waist all this time and now he raised his hand to my ribs. I can feel it here when you sing.

Then, abruptly, he left my side and went to speak to the person manning the karaoke set. He took up his position at the microphone. When the first notes of the Jacky Cheung song played, the audience cheered with surprise and expectation; at every party during those years this song was bound to be played at some point in the evening, yet the moment it came on, it felt as though we were hearing it for the first time. Through the microphone Chuan’s voice sounded deeper than usual, and in those first notes he sang astonishingly in tune. He clasped the mic with both hands and closed his eyes as he emphasised the first words. The people in the bar sang along with him from the start, and a few people whooped their approval. I had always feigned a distaste for the song, telling my friends it was too sentimental and melodramatic, but here it was impossible to resist singing along when Chuan hit the chorus. I just want to spend my life by your side. He raised his hand and stretched it out in my direction, and everyone turned to see who he was singing to. I shook my head and hid my face in my hands and the people in the bar screamed their approval and clapped. When he finished, the room filled with applause and soon the karaoke session was over and the music was back on again, the heavy bass thumping in the background.

‘They’re such terrible lyrics,’ I said.

He made as if to strangle me, but only gently placed his hands around my throat, their sticky warmth spreading down to my chest. ‘Let’s dance,’ he said. We pushed our way through the crowd and joined a few other people who were dancing in the small space where the karaoke set and microphone had been. A young man with dyed yellow hair was waving his arms in the air to the rhythm of the music. I leaned my head in towards Chuan and told him I wouldn’t be able to ride home. I’d had three beers and my head felt heavy. ‘No one’s expecting us home,’ he said. The music was Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’. People were making angular shapes with their arms around their heads and necks and trying to look serious and professional, but all of them gave up after a while and danced messily as they always did. The blue lights in the bar had dimmed – although perhaps I’d imagined this. I put my arms around Chuan’s neck as we danced, and he said something that I couldn’t hear over the music and the people laughing around us. I had the sensation that if I stopped moving I would fall.

You might regret it, Sui says. You might regret it if I stayed here forever. Fong knows that she is joking; that she cannot throw away a life that is rich, pillowy and settled, with a husband and children to provide her with the stability she needs. Why would she? Her days on the farm would be stripped of luxury, full of hard edges and discomfort. Yet he cannot help allowing himself to imagine the shape of their days, filled with a routine that resembles this moment.

Having agreed to go to the market together, they get into the car and drive off with the windows wound down. She says that she likes feeling the warm wind on her face, that she hates air-con. That’s weird, he says, usually people from the city love air-con, they’re addicted to it – can’t stand the heat for more than a few minutes.

Don’t forget I grew up on a farm, she says. While you were growing up with your mother in the middle of town, I was in a village with no electricity. I am the original country person, not you.

They talk about their respective childhoods; they do not reminisce fondly or recall bitter experiences, but instead throw fragments of their pasts into the air as a way to reacquaint themselves with each other. They are almost the same age and have known each other for more than two decades but still, the rediscovery of their friendship feels so rich that it could be sustained for many years.

Remember when you came to stay with us that one time – how long ago was it? Yin wasn’t born yet, it was just me and Lina. You were so miserable, you didn’t want to be there, you just sat in a chair brooding all day, wishing you were back on the farm. You didn’t eat any of the food we made for you. I asked you what was wrong and you said you swore you would never go to the city after your mother died. You were like a grumpy teenager!’

Remember when you first came to visit? Father was still alive and you weren’t even married yet. I thought, yet another precious girl from the city, but then you went across one of the fields and the ground turned muddy but you kept walking as though nothing had changed. Jack turned back immediately, he said he wasn’t wearing the right kind of shoes, but you just took your shoes off and walked barefoot.

I don’t remember that. She shakes her head and laughs. Actually, yes I do. You came running down the path holding a pair of big black rubber boots and I thought, why on earth is that strange boy shouting and waving boots at me? I thought you were mad. I guess you were thinking the same of me.

Remember carrying on barefoot all the way to the tamarind trees? I did think you were crazy.

I wasn’t mad, I was happy. I thought Jack might be waiting there but instead there was just you, holding the boots. You’d followed me all the way.

While talking she occasionally points at something outside – a hawk hovering over the dried-out marshland or a goat that has wandered away from its herd and is making its way up a hill in the distance. These are the sorts of things that he would never notice, they have become part of the tedium of his daily drive into town, where he has to deal with some source of worry – the bank manager, the fruit wholesaler, the building supply merchant to whom he owes money. Soon they are driving into the town and its wide streets. He is momentarily ashamed by the drabness of the town, afraid that it reflects on him, that the shuttered shop lots and the cheap clothing wholesalers and pawnbrokers and betting shops are in some way his fault, that he is the kind of person who keeps these businesses afloat. He is also afraid – and this is wild, unreasonable thinking – that Sui will loathe this town so much that she will never come back. Yet she continues to talk – about the price of vegetables these days, how there’s a shortage of produce in the markets, and isn’t it easy to find parking in small towns like this; she doesn’t mention the half-dead town and its piles of rubbish randomly accumulating by the sides of the road; doesn’t ask if the city council has cut back on its services (it has) or whether the smell that rises from the river is due to pollution further upstream (it is). He is relieved because she merely sees the kind of provincial town that she has known from her youth. The place is not important to her; what matters is the task at hand, which is to go to the market with him.

The market is large and busy, especially for a town this size, and Sui is surprised by how much is available. Quite cheap, she repeats as she walks past the first of the stalls, looking at the prices displayed. She works the market methodically, he notices, making a brief first circuit to figure out the best vendors, doing quick mental calculations of cost and quality, before heading to the pork butcher. She has drawn up a list and doesn’t diverge from it, and Fong thinks that this is what she must be like in her normal life. She has to be concentrated and organised, and work through her chores until she has finished. When she is done with each vendor she hands what she has bought to Fong, who places them in the large raffia bag he has brought. He enjoys trailing along behind her, fulfilling a useful function but essentially exercising no responsibility at all; she is the one making all the decisions, and he feels oddly comforted by that.

Occasionally he waves at someone he knows – stallholders or men he has worked with over the years – and Sui asks him who they are. Just someone, he replies vaguely. He is embarrassed that he has no friends to speak of; he cannot recount an amusing anecdote about any of the people he has just waved to, he has no friendships that can illustrate his interior life, the kind of person he truly is. And what kind of person is that, exactly? Friends are a mirror that allow us to see who we are in relief, he realises. In their strengths we discern our weaknesses, and vice versa. His solitary existence has made him forget who he is and it is only now, with Sui, that he is able to recall himself. He is a tender person, or at least a person capable of tenderness.

After the market they head back to the car, both of them walking slowly because of the heat. Fong wonders how to stretch out their time together without sounding inappropriate but it is Sui who suggests going for an iced coffee. Fong looks down at the bag he is carrying, full of market produce, with tiny pools of blood seeping out from the packets of meat, and though he is momentarily worried about the food spoiling in the sun, he nods and says he knows of a new place. With air-con, he says, just for you.

Yes, I need that because I’m a precious city girl.

Country boys don’t mind air-con either.

He notices, and likes, the way they refer to themselves as boy and girl, even though they are long past that age.

They walk a short distance to a new café that has been open for less than a year – with impeccable timing, it started trading just a few months before the financial markets crashed and all the other shops in town started to close because the banks were calling in their debts. Somehow this place has managed to stay in business, though there’s never anyone there when Fong drives past it, and he knows that soon it too will close. For now, it is cool and airy, decorated simply with white tiles that make it feel modern. They order black iced coffee which costs far more than Fong was expecting, but he puts a hand across the counter to indicate that it is out of the question for Sui to pay. He counts out the cash as casually as he can and drops it onto the white stone surface, then turns to find a table before the waitress can give him back his change.

Once seated, they lean back in comfortable chairs and enjoy the fact that they are the only ones in the café. The coffees arrive, beads of condensation already running down the plastic cups.

So what do you plan to do with the farm? Sui pushes a straw through the opening in the lid and sips slowly. Fong watches the coffee rise slowly in the clear thin tube, filling it until it reaches the top.

He explains his plans to replace the failing orchards and their ageing trees with fast-growing crops like pineapple; he glosses over the need for a loan by saying that he has good relations with the local bank manager; he talks about the restoration of the farm to its former glory, because he knows this is what she would like to hear.

The old man was a good businessman but you couldn’t say he was a good farmer, Sui says, smiling, before sipping her coffee. It’s a shame to lose the fruit trees but I guess you have no choice.

What she says sounds like approval to Fong, which is important – he reminds himself – because she is now the sole legal owner of the land.

As long as you don’t cut down the tamarind trees, she laughs.

They’re old and sick too, you know.

She shrugs. But they’re still alive and still beautiful.

To change the subject, he asks about her children, noting that they are grown up now, more or less, and to his surprise she replies that she is starting to wonder what she will do with all her time once they have flown the nest. The eldest wants to live away from home as soon as she can, the middle one will no doubt follow in her footsteps, leaving only the youngest to think about. Children reconfigure your days, she says. She wasn’t prepared for their arrival, but she wants to make sure she is prepared for their departure.

Our whole lives are spent thinking about our kids, he agrees – we never think about the time when we’ll become useless to them.

She looks at the glass cabinet next to the cash register, which contains a few small cakes, and narrows her eyes as though considering getting one. Sometimes, she says – sometimes, when one of the kids gets angry with me, they say, ‘I never asked you to give birth to me.’ And it’s such a silly thing to say that I can’t help but laugh. Obviously this makes them even more angry.

So what will you do with all your free time? he asks.

She doesn’t answer and instead looks down at the bag of food, sweltering in the heat. She pushes it with the tip of her foot and a small stain of blood appears on the white-tiled floor, where it has leaked from the bag.

I want to be clean for you, Chuan says.

You didn’t seem dirty to me.

I hate being sweaty. I want a life where I can work at a job that doesn’t make me sweat – a job in an office.

You smell nice, Jay says – I like the way you smell. In fact, Jay likes the musky odour of perspiration on Chuan’s skin and clothes, the faint traces of washing detergent overlaid with a more powerful perfume of perspiration that accumulates so quickly in this heat. Jay even likes the cheap deodorant that Chuan has sprayed himself with just before emerging from the bathroom. A few moments before this Jay heard the aerosol hissing expansively on the other side of the door, and now the sickly-sweet scent fills the room as Chuan stands before him, towel wrapped around his waist. This cheap spray that would normally upset Jay’s olfactory sense – he doesn’t like strong smells, gets nauseous on the bus to school every morning with all the aftershaves and fragrances – now excites him. For years afterwards, every time he picks up the chemical muskiness of this kind of cologne on someone’s skin, or in the air in a locker room, he will feel the same frisson that he is experiencing now, that to him signifies possibility, the unfolding of an afternoon, an evening, a lifetime.

He doesn’t yet know, as I do, that those will merely be illusions.

He steps into the shower for a quick wash, not because he needs to but because it will give him a few moments to figure out how to act. He has never been in a bedroom with another man before. Once, a man approached him in a bookshop in a mall, where he was sitting in a corner hurriedly reading books he couldn’t afford to buy (he’d carefully removed them from their plastic wrapping and stacked them up neatly in a pile). The man sat down next to him and asked if there was anything dirty in the book he was reading, which was odd because it was Of Mice and Men, and Jay had to think about its content before saying no, there wasn’t, at which point the man put his hand on Jay’s thigh and said, How about that, do you think this is okay, or do you think it’s dirty? Jay hesitated for a few seconds before standing up and feeling the man’s hand fall limply from his thigh. He felt hot with desire but mostly with shame as he walked away, though he wasn’t sure why he was ashamed – because the man had guessed what he was (was it that easy to see?), because the man had touched him, or because he had walked away? Another time, in the showers at the public swimming pool not far from school, one of the lifeguards had pulled down his swimming trunks and showed him his cock, inviting him to touch it. It had looked so surprising, a dark protrusion from the man’s pale groin, protected from the sun, when the rest of him was tanned. The man had reached out and taken his hand, guiding it slowly towards him, but just then a group of others walked in and the moment was lost. Jay returned almost every day to the pool, sometimes missing school to loiter in the showers, so great was his need to recapture that moment of lost excitement, but each time he went, the lifeguard pretended to ignore him until one afternoon, the man squeezed Jay’s left buttock as he walked past him.

That is the extent of his experience. It doesn’t offer him much guidance. I wish I could tell him that he will always be nervous.

In the bathroom, he thinks desperately of what to do and say when he will return to the room in a few moments. Will he be shy and coquettish, like a woman on TV, or guttural and imposing, the way men are? In any case, he’s impatient, and so he steps back into the room.

That first time under the trees had been too rushed, and now both of them want to enjoy the expansive privacy of this bedroom. They lie down next to each other and kiss.

That’s the first time I’ve ever kissed anyone, Jay says. I don’t believe you, Chuan replies and kisses him, harder now. Jay pulls away – Who was the first person you did this with, he asks, but Chuan doesn’t answer, he kisses him again, crushing the question on Jay’s lips.

Jay insists: Was it a boy or a girl? He is not just curious to know about Chuan’s past, he also wants to slow things down. He thinks that by talking, he will be more in control of the situation; that in answering his questions Chuan will move less hurriedly, touch him less urgently. He doesn’t want this first experience of lovemaking to be over so quickly, he wants to savour every second. He touches Chuan with fingertip grazes, the opposite of how Chuan is touching him, hoping that Chuan will realise that this is how he wants things to be, but he feels no recognition of his signals in Chuan’s movements. ‘Slow down,’ he says, ‘slow down,’ but he realises that Chuan is not capable of giving him the tenderness he craves. For a few moments he feels lost. Maybe he shouldn’t be here. Maybe this is not what he wanted after all. But despite this doubt he becomes aware that he is aroused, as if his body is not attuned to his disappointment. He notices that Chuan’s skin is now clammy and sticky to the touch, whereas just a few minutes ago it was fresh and smooth from the shower, and something about this evolution excites Jay, the idea that someone else’s body is capable of altering his own sense of smell and touch. He experiences the same sensation that he experienced under the trees: his body is no longer entirely his to control, and this loss of sovereignty is a kind of freedom.

Chuan is saying something, mumbling words that sound like I want you, I love you, and this unsettles Jay more than anything in this encounter, because he is incapable of responding in kind. He has desired Chuan for so many weeks now but he can hardly speak. He is the one who reads books, he is the one who should possess the necessary words to articulate how he feels, but he is unable to summon them. All he can discern is his body responding to Chuan, the intense sensation of being lost, and then, to their surprise – he comes.

I thought you wanted to be slow, Chuan says a bit later, when they have recovered their breath and are lying in bed, watching the table fan swivel lazily from side to side.

Don’t know what happened, Jay says, embarrassed.

It’s okay, Chuan says, you’re young. I take it as a compliment. His voice is patient, reassuring; and Jay finds that the sound of Chuan’s voice makes him drowsy. He rests his head in the hollow between Chuan’s neck and his shoulder. He closes his eyes but Chuan wants to continue speaking. Jay hears the words reverberate but can’t make them out, because he is already falling asleep.

My father was sitting in the shade of a parasol that he’d set up on the patch of grass overlooking the small stream. He’d carried a small table down from the house and laid out his sketch pad on it, and was painting the scene in front of him with his small tray of watercolours.

‘He’s painted the same thing about three or four times now,’ Lina said as we watched him from the veranda. ‘They all look the same to me.’

‘They’re meant to be impressions of the landscape, not the real thing – that’s what he told me anyway,’ Yin said. ‘Maybe he’s going senile.’

‘Can’t you ask him what’s wrong with him?’ I said to Yin. Of the three of us, she was the only one capable of having a conversation with our father in a consistently civilised manner. Sometimes I’d surprise them discussing an issue unrelated to home life – the cost of living, the behaviour of neighbours’ children – in a rational, adult manner, with questions and answers that suggested a real exchange.

‘Leaving him alone is the best strategy when he’s in this kind of mood,’ Yin replied.

‘Are you actually interested in what’s going on in Jack Lim’s head?’ Lina said. ‘It’s a swamp in there.’ She’d taken to calling our father by his name, as if he were a distant third party unrelated to us. I looked at him hunched over his little folding table, wearing a baseball cap that he’d found in the house to protect his head and eyes from the glare of the sun, even though he was in the shade of the parasol. His hand moved shakily, it seemed to me, though perhaps he might have been painting the undulating line of the hills in the distance. Every so often he would dip the paintbrush into a mug of water and look up at the landscape before him. I wondered if he noticed the way the light was changing as it caught the tops of the trees in the orchards beyond, suggesting the fading of the afternoon; if he recorded the variation in colour in the patches of vegetation that indicated where the trees were struggling or in some cases dying; if he spotted the brightly hued birds flitting in and out of the long grass, which Chuan had pointed out to me and told me were bee-eaters that caught large insects in full flight. With his curved back and bony elbows he looked old and unfamiliar to us.

We decided to head into town early and wait for Chuan to finish his shift before having an early dinner. My mother and Fong had gone out earlier that afternoon to tend to business relating to the farm – paperwork that should normally have been my father’s responsibility but which my mother had evidently taken charge of, seeing as she was now, after all, the owner of the land. They had taken Fong’s car, leaving us with only one scooter or the lorry, which Lina couldn’t drive, so the only option was to take our old Volvo, a normally impossible notion which now seemed feasible. Yin was dispatched to ask our father for permission and to get the keys from him. She shrugged with the assurance of someone who knew they would succeed and strode off across the grass, greeting him by gently placing her hand on his shoulder. She bent over and rested her hands on her knees as she looked at the watercolour. They chatted for a few moments and she let out a soft laugh. He drew the car key from his pocket and handed it to her and she remained for a while longer, pointing at something on his sketch pad as though fascinated by some small detail that she’d spotted. Then she lifted his baseball cap and kissed him on the top of his head before replacing the cap and returning to us, holding the key up with one finger like an exquisite miniature trophy.

The traffic was heavy; people were finishing work and driving back out to the surrounding villages or leaving for the city for a night out. Even in a place as small as this, rush hour was surprisingly busy. We drove into town using the shortcut that Chuan had shown me, past the river barrage on the opposite bank, skirting the river walls thick with weeds and rubbish. The measuring pole rose from the reeds to show the height of past floods, rising ten, twelve feet above the ground, but now, after months of drought, it seemed redundant and out of place. The water in the river was muddy and sluggish, impossible to imagine as a threat. We eased past the rows of shabby single-storey houses and managed to find a spot to park along the main road not far from the 7-Eleven. From a distance we could see Chuan kneeling on the floor, unpacking litre-bottles of soft drinks and arranging them on the shelves. He was wearing a hat back to front as he sometimes did on the farm, to protect his neck from the sun; it looked out of place in the air-conditioned confines of the shop.

I got my phone and sent him a text saying: Tuck your shirt in while you’re at work, you look scruffy. A few seconds later he reached into his pocket and looked at his phone. He looked up and smiled when he saw us crossing the road towards the shop. He held up his wrist and tapped it as though he was wearing a watch – he’d be finishing in half an hour, we guessed, and Lina suggested walking back down to the river and waiting for him at the cheap Chinese seafood place she’d seen earlier, down by the base of the bridge that spanned the two banks of the river. I texted him to let him know where we’d be and we set off on foot.

‘We deserve a proper meal,’ Lina said. ‘Feels as though we haven’t sat down to a decent dinner in weeks.’ She sounded almost sorry as she spoke, as if missing something she hadn’t realised was valuable. She added, ‘There won’t be any family meals now that Jack Lim is in his moody phase.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t speak about him like that,’ Yin said. ‘Personally I think he’s suffering from depression.’

‘Personally I think he’s a bad-tempered asshole.’

‘Look at that,’ I said, pointing to the far bank of the river that was just coming into view. A flock of white birds, maybe egrets, were standing on its banks, almost motionless, among the pieces of plastic bags and tin cans caught in the caked-over mud. There were about thirty or forty of them, scouting the surface of the water.

We continued walking in silence along the narrow band of dry, crispy grass between the traffic of the busy road and the slope of the riverbank, until the bridge came into view. Lina started to speak, her voice almost drowned out by the roar of the traffic, but not quite. It was as though she needed the noise in order to say what she was going to say. She told us about how she was awakened from sleep one night when we were all still children, by the sound of our parents arguing. It seemed as though it was very late but it might only have been eight or nine o’clock. When you’re a child, time doesn’t hold any significance; you fall asleep and if you wake up ten minutes later it feels as if you’ve emerged into a different universe. She was ten, maybe eleven years old. In any case she didn’t look at the time, she just opened her eyes and walked to my parents’ room, to where the noise was coming from. Their voices were raised. In those days they argued more than they did now, but maybe Yin and I were too young to remember. We were only six and eight, how could she expect us to be aware of what was going on? (I was only too aware, I wanted to say, but didn’t.) She pushed open the door to my parents’ room and saw our mother’s face pale with fury. She had known our mother capable of sullenness and flashes of temper, but never such anger, so intense that when she saw the door open and Lina standing in the doorway, she was incapable of letting go of her rage; it was as though she had gathered all that rage to be hurled against her husband and if she allowed it to dissipate, it might never come back again. Jack Lim had not heard the door open, my mother had been shouting too loudly. He had just picked something up off the table, a big heavy book, maybe even the phone book – Lina couldn’t be sure – and was lifting it high, above his head, and advancing towards our mother with his head pushed towards hers, and just as he was about to bring the object down upon her, Lina screamed: ‘Stop. Stop!’ She screamed so loudly that she didn’t recognise the voice as belonging to her, so loudly that she had to cover her own ears. But he did stop. He dropped the book – was it a book, or something else? – and turned to face her. His expression changed. She was reminded of a champion gymnast she had seen on TV, on the high bar, or the parallel bars – something which involved swinging in giant loops, flipping and changing directions in mid-air – when unexpectedly the gymnast had missed the bar by a fraction of an inch and missed her hold, falling violently to the floor. The camera had zoomed in on her, and because she was a great champion, she still had an air of invincibility set into her features, an obstinacy that came from years of being unchallenged, only now she was dazed, and because she had been twisting in the air, for several seconds while she sat on the floor, she didn’t know which way she was facing; she had lost her points of reference, her world had been shaken and rearranged, and it would be a few moments before she could organise the broken pieces and put them back together. That was what our father’s face resembled when he realised that Lina had witnessed what he had been about to do. In the years since, every time she remembered the way he’d stared at her in the doorway, she thought about the gymnast who’d fallen from a great height.

Before any of them could speak, Lina had run back to the room she shared with us. She was certain that all the noise would have woken us up but the two of us were still sleeping deeply, the way only children can. She shut the door and, against all rules, locked it, drawing the deadbolt tightly shut. She had been terrified that our father would come after her and hit her too – or, even worse, and she didn’t know why she thought this might happen, wrench one of us from our beds and punish us for what she had done, and she had to protect us from him, from her own foolhardiness, she should never have interfered in our parents’ battles. Seeing us asleep in our bunk beds, feeling responsible for us, she suddenly felt old beyond her years. She sat on her bed and waited for him to bang on the door – but nothing. Instead, she heard footsteps approach gently; she wasn’t sure whose. The door handle clicked softly once, and the footsteps retreated to the other end of the corridor. In the days that followed, both our father and mother made an effort to be kind to us. Yin and I probably didn’t remember, but my father came back with tubs of ice-cream from the supermarket, an expenditure so rare and extravagant that none of us dared to eat it at first and had to be coaxed into doing so. (I did remember: there was vanilla, chocolate and raspberry ripple.) Still, Lina couldn’t ever forget the gymnast, the look on her face.

We continued along the wide, flat road that led to the river. Small lorries, motorbikes and old cars with rattling engines accelerated past us as we walked, and it was sometimes hard to make out what Lina was saying. I saw the restaurant a few hundred metres away and felt like breaking into a run.

‘You must have dreamed that up,’ Yin said in a monotone. ‘It didn’t happen. Not the way you describe it, anyway.’

Lina shook her head and said calmly, ‘That was exactly how it was.’ There was a softness in her voice that sounded like resignation, as if she had been expecting Yin’s reaction and decided in advance not to be drawn into an argument.

‘You were small, you can’t remember clearly – you’re exaggerating,’ Yin said. She tried to sound light-hearted, as if Lina had just delivered a playful anecdote that required a similar response. ‘Anyway, it just sounds like an argument. Was it a big deal?’

‘Yin, he was about to hit her. And maybe he already had.’

‘I would have woken up with all the noise. Why is it that you were the only one who woke up – because you’re the oldest, is that it?’

‘Because it’s the way it happened.’

Neither of them asked me. I was the youngest, I was presumed to know nothing, but that wasn’t the case. I hadn’t been asleep that night.

A scooter beeped insistently as it drew up alongside us. ‘You guys walk so slowly,’ Chuan shouted over the noise of the traffic. I got on the scooter with him, even though the restaurant was very close now. We parked and walked down the steps to the restaurant, which was built on a platform jutting out over the river, its waterline much lower than usual after the months of drought. The drop in the water level exposed the rubbish marooned on the muddy banks that were crusting in the heat. Car tyres, a pram, a tricycle, shoes, children’s clothes, a small fridge . . . ‘If we drained the whole river, I wonder what we’d find,’ Chuan said. ‘A history of the lives we never wanted.’

‘Maybe we could read our fortunes the way we read our palms,’ I said.

Lina and Yin turned up and seemed brighter than when I’d left them a few minutes before. It was the kind of place with no menu, and the owner of the restaurant – an older woman with blonde highlights and jade bangles on her wrists – came to tell us what was on offer. She delivered the list in a robotic fashion while gazing out over the river at the opposite side, never once faltering as she recited the menu by heart. We looked at each other while she spoke and suppressed the urge to giggle, and when she got to the final item we chose the cheapest dishes, large portions of fried rice and vegetables and one helping of fried pork ribs to make the dinner seem festive. The owner wrote down our order on a notepad and walked away without saying anything.

‘She hates us for not ordering more fancy food,’ Yin said. She opened her purse and checked how much money she had, and the rest of us did the same, but we already knew we didn’t have enough to pay for anything expensive.

‘What matters is that we’re sitting down for a meal,’ Lina said. ‘No parents, no stress.’

Dusk settled over the river and large swarms of swifts filled the sky, swooping over the surface of the water. Back in the city the evenings often felt like an extension of the day, filled with the same responsibilities and conflicts – homework, the anxiety carried over from the school day, my parents’ moods. Here, the shift was decisive; the darkness released us into the night, long and full of possibility.

The food arrived, served by an Indonesian waitress who announced the name of each dish in flawless Cantonese. We hadn’t realised how hungry we were; we had forgotten, also, the pleasure of sitting at a table and eating a meal while talking and laughing. Perhaps we had never known that pleasure. Lina spoke about her evenings out with her friends at university up in the north, how she was looking forward to graduating and starting her own graphic design business working for companies to make money, while pursuing her own photo and video art. A gallerist was already interested in her work, and she was confident she’d make a breakthrough in a few years. She’d always dreamed of being an artist, and if things worked out well she’d move to Hong Kong or Seoul, maybe Los Angeles – why not? But before that – within five years, because she had started to map out a five- and ten-year plan for herself – she wanted to take a year out of work and studies to go backpacking around the world, picking up small jobs here and there, staying longer in one place if she wanted to, moving on to another if she didn’t feel safe. She liked the idea of Mexico City.

Yin was making small depressions in the pile of rice on her plate with the back of her spoon, dividing it into tiny portions which she then lifted delicately into her mouth. She had a plan for college, she explained. She was going to study pharmacy because that was what the parents had planned for her, but what she really wanted was to be a yoga teacher, so she would have to do her training in secret and only tell our parents once she was financially independent. ‘Why secret?’ Lina said. ‘Forget college, just go to India and learn yoga and let them deal with the fact that you’re a dropout.’ She offered to give Yin some money as soon as she was earning enough, and they linked pinkie fingers the way they did when we were children.

Chuan said he was going to move into town and see what came up. He had friends who had found jobs in Singapore, waiting tables or working in factories where the pay was six or seven times what you could get here, and you could commute across the border every day, it only took an hour. If he could save up enough money, he’d want to go back to college, take a diploma in something, anything, get some qualifications. Something non-technical. He wanted to read books, learn about the world. It seemed like an achievable set of aims. He didn’t want to be like his father, always dreaming up crazy schemes that never came to anything. Look at the poor fool now, with nothing to show for his forty-odd years and no future to look forward to. Chuan wished he had Lina’s resolve, but he couldn’t leave his father entirely on his own. His life was circumscribed by his father’s, he knew that. Besides, Chuan added, maybe he would find someone who would make him want to stay in one place?

‘That’s highly unlikely,’ said Lina. ‘You’re twenty years old, what do you know about commitment?’

‘Sometimes, you just know,’ Chuan said defiantly.

‘And you, Jay, what plans do you have?’ Lina said, turning to me. ‘Leaving the protection of your dear mother might be the first step?’

I showed her the middle finger and said that I still had a couple of years left at school, I didn’t have to make up my mind about my whole life just yet. I might be a brain surgeon. I might be a dancer. I might be a labourer on a farm down here in the south.

Lina narrowed her eyes as if considering the list of options seriously. ‘Sure, take your time,’ she said. ‘But not too much. Because you have less of it than you think.’

We talked about driving into the city. We had the car, so why not make use of it? We would drive to the bar that Chuan had taken me to and spend a few hours there, dancing and singing karaoke. No one had stipulated any rules against this; we ignored Yin’s half-hearted protests about safety and the trouble we’d be in if we met with an accident. Could we imagine having to ring our father in the dead of the night and tell him we’d crashed the Volvo? The idea that any misfortune should occur that night seemed so preposterous that we laughed it off as wild conjecture and set off back to the car.

Chuan’s phone beeped as we were walking and when he looked at it, his mood changed. I asked him if anything was the matter – it wasn’t his father, was it? – but he said no, it was Jessie, not a big deal, but he’d have to go and get her.

‘Bring your friend along!’ Lina said. ‘There’s space in the car for one more, easily.’

Chuan shook his head and told us it was fine; the three of us should go for our evening out as planned, and he would go and get Jessie and take her back to hers, and if there was still time he would come and join us; we could send him a text to let him know where we were and he’d come. He didn’t have much credit left on his phone so he wouldn’t be able to call, but he would find us.

‘Why don’t we go with you?’ I said. ‘We can collect Jessie wherever she is, drop her home and go straight on to the city.’

Lina climbed into the car and started up the engine. ‘Good idea – for once, Jay!’ It took four or five turns of the key to get it started.

Chuan shook his head. It wasn’t so simple: Jessie was at the police station. It wasn’t a big deal, it had happened a few times in the past, though more and more often in the past few months, so much so that the police weren’t really interested anymore. She had a problem with substances.

‘You mean a drug problem,’ Yin said.

No, you couldn’t really call it that, Chuan explained as we got into the car.

Lina said we couldn’t leave him to go to the police station on his own; we would go with him and make sure he was safe. In this country you never knew, she said; he would be safer in a group when he went to the station.

Jessie had been found unconscious on the street, Chuan told us. This was usually how it was, although once she had been arrested and cautioned for stealing some chocolates from a supermarket and when she got to the station the police found that she was high, which was unusual because she was usually coming off a high and crashing miserably. Whatever the case, she was never in a good way when Chuan came to get her. She’d started by sniffing glue when she was young, thirteen or fourteen, and in recent years had been taking amphetamines and ecstasy or whatever pills were circulating in that cheap hair salon she worked in. Chuan didn’t know exactly what she took, and doubted that she did either. You know what it’s like in a small town like this, he said. You never have enough money to buy exactly what you want, so you make do with something similar. If she didn’t have any money at all she would sometimes crush paracetamol or other ordinary pills and mix them with alcohol. Sometimes it would work and make her feel drowsy and happy, sometimes it wouldn’t, so she experimented. She told Chuan that she loved the unpredictability of these cocktails. She’d be walking along the street and feeling fine one moment, then the next minute she’d be sitting on the pavement, knowing she might pass out. There was always a window of time that lasted ten minutes, half an hour, two hours, sometimes a whole day, when she felt that she had slipped into the numbing, empty space, and even though she knew it wouldn’t last, she was happy. That was the only way to describe it. She was happy.

Chuan could tell that we were worried and he tried to brush off Jessie’s arrest as a minor incident. We were sitting in the back seat, he and I, and he reached out to take my hand, gripping it lightly, and I thought I should have been the one to do that; I should have been the one to reassure him.

He wasn’t concerned about Jessie getting into real trouble; she never carried any drugs with her and no one could charge her for overdosing on paracetamol or cough syrup and beer. The police treated her as a kind of recurring joke. He knew the officers in the station, they called him Towkay, Boss – familiar terms. What troubled him was the thought of what could happen to her when she got to the station. Very often she was semi-conscious, and couldn’t recall anything afterwards. He was afraid that they would touch her, or even worse. Once, after Chuan had collected her from the station and taken her home, she discovered that she was wearing her underwear back to front, and had no idea how that had happened. Either she had been so drowsy that she had made a mistake sometime during the night, or someone else had taken them off and put them back on hastily. She just couldn’t be sure. That’s when Chuan started to wonder if the policemen’s friendliness was in fact an admission of guilt. The jokes might have been designed to hide something. He just couldn’t tell. ‘Of course something happened,’ Lina said grimly. ‘How can you be a woman and be safe in a place like that? Surrounded by those—’

‘Let’s not talk about it,’ Yin said. Without turning to look at Lina, she reached out and put a hand on Lina’s wrist, close to where it gripped the steering wheel.

The streets were more brightly lit as we approached the police station and Lina began to slow down. ‘You never told me this,’ I whispered to Chuan. I felt embarrassed that I hadn’t shown more sympathy for Jessie; embarrassed, also, because her worries made mine seem insignificant.

‘It wasn’t important,’ he replied. ‘You’re too young to know about it anyway.’

‘I know about it now.’

He squeezed my hand as if to say sorry, but I didn’t know what he was apologising for.

We parked the car and crossed the concrete yard in the glare of the floodlights in front of the station. We were about to walk into the building when Lina told me and Yin to wait outside. Chuan nodded. ‘Five minutes and we’ll be done.’ As he went in, he turned around and gave me a thumbs up and a smile.

Yin and I sat on the front step of the station and looked out across the car park. In the harsh white light, the cracks in the concrete looked like veins of marble and the dust on the windscreens of the cars appeared as fine as talcum powder.

‘You looking forward to leaving home soon?’ I asked after a while.

She made a non-committal movement with her head. ‘Guess so. I don’t want Mum to be lonely.’

‘I’ll still be around,’ I said.

She made a noise that sounded affirmative but didn’t elaborate. I knew what she was thinking – that I was too young and immature to deal with a crisis.

‘I’m not breaking up with Farid,’ she said after a while. ‘That’s his name. My boyfriend. Don’t tell Lina.’

‘If you’re happy with him, sure, why not?’

‘I wouldn’t say I’m happy. I just don’t want to break up.’

I didn’t reply and instead turned to look at the clock that hung above the station entrance. I waited ten minutes before standing up and heading inside.

‘Where are you going?’ Yin cried out sharply. ‘They told us to stay and wait.’

There was no one at the reception desk. It was late for a small town like this and the entire station seemed quiet. I walked beyond the front office down a corridor, following the sound of voices at the back of the building, and eventually saw a row of cells adjacent to an open-plan office where a few men, some in uniforms, some not, sat around drinking from Styrofoam cups and eating packets of food laid out on the desks. I could hear Lina, loud but calm, and saw her speaking to a policeman who was holding his hand up at chest level, palms facing her as if to stop her from coming towards him, even though she wasn’t moving. As I walked towards her I went past a small cell with three women in it, but I couldn’t see Jessie. It was only when I was close that I saw Chuan in another cell, helping Jessie to her feet; there were two other people, in it, both men. When Chuan saw me he waved me away, but I refused to leave. I went to help him with Jessie but Lina stopped me and led me back down the corridor, back towards the car park. Yin was waiting for us, standing at the threshold as if held back by an invisible screen. Framed by the doorway, with the brilliant light behind her, she looked tall and very slender.

We drove Jessie home and decided that Chuan and I should stay the night with her just to be safe. We gave her some tea, which was very hot and seemed to cheer her up but later that night she threw up violently. We could hear her in the bathroom, her chest heaving even when it didn’t seem as though there was anything left in her stomach to bring up. Chuan gave her some water, and sat with her until she drank most of the bottle, and in the morning she seemed to be all right again. She woke up at eleven and said she was hungry, so we made her toast spread with margarine with some sugar sprinkled on it, and she said it made her feel better.

Your father, Sui starts to say. Your father.

She falters. In her head, she has practised what she has to say for some days now, sometimes even catching herself mumbling the sentences aloud as though rehearsing lines.

She can’t explain, even in her most silent, lonely moments, when she is the most honest with herself, why she has chosen this child over the other two – the child who shall be the one to bear the burden of hearing what she has to say. She never used to believe in maternal instinct, seeing as her own mother had had none; her mother had struck her as a logical woman with a reason for everything, even love. A mother offers the most love to the child that loves her the most. It’s simple. And since she has given equal love to all her children, they should all return her love equally.

But how has the equation worked out in reality?

Lina, the firstborn: who didn’t open her eyes for the first two months of her life, and when she finally did, looked at Sui with an unwavering gaze, studying her intensely before deciding that she couldn’t trust her own mother to keep her safe. You’re imagining things, Sui told herself then, she’s only a baby. But a space between them had arisen right from the start, and love alone has not been enough to close it in the years since.

Yin, the second: who grew more like her mother with every year, from the way her cheekbones narrowed in adolescence to the way she had learned to speak respectfully to Jack, hiding the way she truly felt, especially when she was sad or angry with him. Her manners were contained and neat; she wanted the orderly life she thought Sui had. Flee, Sui wanted to say, the first time she noticed these traits in her second child. Every time she looks at Yin these days she feels guilty; the more she nurtures Yin, the more she gives her a model for life. Her love has entrapped her daughter.

Jay, the youngest: still so lost, so incapable. Incapable, also, of breaking free from his father’s expectations. He lacks his sisters’ clarity. At his age – sixteen – both of them already knew, more or less, the kind of life they wanted to lead. Perhaps he will soon grow up, become self-assured, confident and dismissive in the model of his father, but for now, he is confused, and Sui’s love cannot point him in the right direction.

Except this is not really a question of love. It is a question of need, and of resistance. Sui knows that it is not fair to burden her children with a confession of this sort, but if she doesn’t, her anger and frustration will corrode her. She has to share it with someone.

The child Sui has chosen to speak to about Jack is not necessarily the one she loves most, but the one she feels is the most capable of receiving what she has to say; she doesn’t know what that child will do with the truths she will share, but she senses that this child in particular will not be destroyed by this knowledge, will not want to seek justice on her behalf. The child will simply hold what Sui has to say, quietly, and never mention it again, unless Sui does.

How does she know this child will be as resilient as she thinks? Call it mother’s instinct – maybe such a thing does exist after all.

Lines she has rehearsed:

Your father is a good person but does not know how to behave like a good person.

Your father has been having an affair for the last ten years.

Many people know about it. Friends, neighbours, relatives. They talk about it in secret but in front of me they smile and talk about food and the weather. They ask, And Jack, how is he doing? Their smiles are weapons.

It is said that your father has had a child with this other woman. (Pause for effect.) I don’t know if this is true or not. In fact I don’t want to know. (Don’t lose control.)

I shouldn’t be surprised. It isn’t unusual for Chinese men to have this sort of arrangement. Your father’s father had exactly the same, for decades. Like father, like son – what can you expect?

Don’t ask me to explain why I stayed with him; I can’t.

But times have changed. Those men belong to a previous generation.

Men cannot, should not, treat women like this anymore. Do you hear me?

Now you know. (Pause.) That’s all I have to say. Don’t mention this to your father or anyone else. You should just forget it and move on.

She felt so calm, so poised, whenever she rehearsed the lines in her head. The relief of even imagining sharing these words with someone else made her feel at peace, the anxiety draining out of her nervous system. When the time came, she was sure she would deliver all that she had to say with perfect poise and nobility, without a trace of bitterness.

She doesn’t know why she stumbles over the very first words and has now stopped speaking.

‘Mum, what’s up?’

Sui hears the child’s voice, and the lightness of its youth makes her feel ashamed of what she has been planning to say.

‘Mum, you all right?’

Sui nods.

This was a very bad idea.

She turns to leave the room. ‘Yes, Jay, sorry. I’m so tired. I forgot what I was going to say.’

‘Something about Dad.’

‘Oh – yes. He’s going out for the day tomorrow.’

She can hear the bright bouncy electronic beeps from Jay’s computer game resume as she walks down the corridor back to the kitchen.

Love – what has that done for her?

We had walked back from the lake holding hands but as we approached the house, Chuan and I moved a bit further from each other, hoping that the space between us would conceal our guilt, our pleasure at being with each other. We couldn’t have been more than a foot away from each other, yet the distance felt artificial and painful after a day spent by the lake. I asked him if he thought we would be able to hold hands in the street one day, somewhere – maybe not in this small town, and maybe not even where I lived, but in a huge sprawling city like Tokyo or Rio or New York, where people were too busy to wonder why we were holding hands. He laughed and said, ‘Don’t you have better things to think about in life?’

My parents and Fong were sitting in the living room when we walked in, upright and oddly formal in the rattan armchairs. I was surprised to see them together; we had grown accustomed to the looseness of our family’s arrangements, particularly in the evenings, when Chuan and I usually went into town, and now the suggestion of a family dinner made me feel anxious.

‘We were just going to change and go to town,’ I said, trying to head off any invitations to stay.

‘Your father has something to tell you before you go out,’ my mother said. ‘Go get your sisters.’

I was at once relieved that we wouldn’t be required to stay for dinner and annoyed that our departure would be delayed further, and I scrambled up the stairs to call Yin and Lina. When we were all downstairs we – the children – remained standing, a signal of our impatience to get on with our evenings.

‘So,’ my mother said, but she turned to look at Fong, not my father. Fong did not return her gaze, he simply stared impassively at the coffee table in front of him, blinking occasionally as if waking up from a long sleep.

My father began to speak. It was clear that the farm was failing, he said, and the money required to bring it back to profitability would be too great. We – the children – should know that he had been making very generous contributions towards its upkeep over the years, in memory of his father and the affection that our grandfather once had for the farm. But now it was simply untenable, it had to be sold and he had already contacted agents who would arrange for its auction in the coming months.

‘Why are you telling us this?’ Lina said. ‘It’s not like we live here or anything. It’s Fong and Chuan you should be discussing this with.’

‘And Mum,’ Yin added. ‘Who owns the place.’

My father explained that he and my mother had already had long discussions about the farm and its future. In fact the decision had already been made even before we set out for our trip – right after our grandfather’s will had been finalised. It wasn’t a hard decision to make; it was the only one possible.

‘Is that true?’ Fong said, turning to my mother. ‘You already decided?’ She didn’t answer.

A few land agents had told my father that foreign investors would be interested in a piece of land like this, so close to Singapore, which was so small and urban and lacking in agricultural land. Organic farming was all the rage down there, people were rich, and they would happily pay a premium for a farm like this. We weren’t to worry about Fong and Chuan. They would get a proportion of the money from the sale – enough to buy somewhere comfortable in town. My father delivered this last piece of information solemnly, as though it were an act of great generosity.

‘What about his income?’ I said. ‘What will he do for a job.’

My father turned to Fong and said, ‘You’ll have to ask him. I can’t organise everything in everyone’s lives.’

Fong sat upright in his chair and raised his hand, as if he thought he needed to signal the importance of what he was going to say. My mother moved her fingers in my father’s direction to indicate that he should not interrupt whatever Fong was about to say. ‘I have a plan,’ he said, in a voice so calm it seemed as though he hadn’t absorbed anything my father had just said. ‘I am going to buy the land. A friend works in the local bank, I can get a loan. Then I’ll build some holiday chalets just like the people did in the plot next door. Chuan will help me, we can get some workers in. In less than a year we will be in business.’

He unfolded a piece of paper with a rudimentary sketch of a house on it. ‘It’s so easy, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.’ He spoke slowly, as though it were a speech he’d prepared. Standing in the room watching them, I felt as though I was watching a play and they were all actors rehearsing their lines, my mother, my father and Fong, and that they really wanted to say entirely different things to each other, using different words and tones; that if we weren’t there, and they found themselves in another place than this one, where they were slightly altered and perhaps freer versions of themselves, they would be shouting profanities at each other.

But in this strange rehearsed version of themselves, where each was playing their role, my father stood up and sighed. ‘I already told you, Fong, that’s a ridiculous plan.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Fong replied calmly. ‘You’re just a teacher with no experience of life.’

My father laughed and started to walk out of the room. ‘Your plan won’t work.’ He said it with an air of resignation, in the kind of patient voice he must have reserved for the most obdurate of his students. It was a tone of voice I knew well, and recognised as signalling the end of any discussion. Maybe that was what it meant to be a man, I thought: to be capable of such finality; to exclude the possibility of further change or evolution. It was what made my father who he was, and what made me what he wasn’t.

My mother, playing her role, sought to reassure us. ‘We will make sure Fong and Chuan are looked after.’

Lina made a derisory noise, somewhere between a laugh and a snort, and put a cigarette between her lips. She lit it before she was even out of the house.

Chuan went upstairs to get a new shirt. He hadn’t said anything, and had fidgeted with his lighter while our parents had been speaking, flicking it on and staring at its ever diminishing flame as if to remind himself that he needed a new one. I had expected him to speak out in defence of his home but when he remained silent I realised how futile it would have been for him to have said anything. I saw, then, why he needed to leave. How can we live in a place when we know that it belongs to someone else? We believe it is our home, we allow our roots to settle in its soil – for how can we not? We know no other place – but somehow, and who knows why this happens, we harbour a grain of doubt; we know, we expect, that we will be moved on, even though we cannot yet anticipate how this move will be triggered; all we know is that when it happens, we will be powerless to resist it; words are pointless and even ridiculous, for they cannot adequately combat or lament this loss. Better to save your strength for future conflicts elsewhere.

‘Do you realise what you’re doing?’ I addressed both my mother and father, looking at them in turn. My father turned around to meet my gaze briefly but then continued on his way; my mother didn’t answer and started to pick at the fraying bits of upholstery on the sofa. Eventually she said, ‘It doesn’t concern you.’

Yin held my wrist and slowly began to lead me out of the house to join Lina, who was already across the yard next to the scooters. She was wiping the handlebars of the one she had come to think of as hers, even though each time she used it she made a point of saying it was borrowed from Fong; she was borrowing, not colonising, she joked. Yin said, ‘They’re right, it’s none of our business. In a few days we’ll be gone. We were never meant to be here for long.’

We discussed the likely outcomes of the sale: would our mother actually benefit from the proceeds of the sale or would our father insist on his patriarchal rights and bank the entirety of it? Would there be anything left once the debts were paid off, and a new place bought for Fong? Would there be enough to buy him anything?

‘I really hope Mum gets her fair share, that’s all,’ Yin said.

‘Sorry,’ Lina replied, ‘she’s complicit in this. She’s the sole legal owner of the property, she can do what she wants, but instead she bows to the wishes of her husband and pretends that it’s okay. We can’t support her in that case. She’s made her decision.’

‘It’s not that easy for her,’ I said. ‘You know what Dad’s like. She doesn’t have a choice.’

‘Everyone has a choice,’ Lina replied. ‘It’s just that exercising choice isn’t easy.’

‘You’re a heartless bitch,’ Yin said, and walked back to the house.

Lina dropped her cigarette butt and ground it out with her foot. ‘Just as well you have plans to go out tonight,’ she said. ‘The family dinner isn’t going to be a lot of fun.’

‘If there is one,’ I said. ‘You coming with us?’

She shook her head and lit another cigarette. ‘Nah, I can’t leave Yin with those mad people.’

‘She’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘She gets along better with them than you do. Besides, she’s pissed off with you.’

‘She’ll get over it.’

Chuan came out of the house and started jogging towards us. He’d changed his shirt and when he came close we could smell the deodorant he’d sprayed abundantly on himself. ‘Wah, look at you. Is this your special hot-boy look for when you get evicted from your home?’ Lina said. Her eyes were shining as she laughed, as if she truly believed that Chuan’s beauty would be enough to carry us all through the situation we were in; and it was impossible, then, not to feel some kind of optimism. She could judge each situation and knew exactly what to say. Only four years separated us but I felt at that moment that I might never acquire her ability to display hilarity or anger at the right moment, that indefinable skill that made an adult an adult.

‘I always look hot,’ Chuan said. ‘I don’t have to try.’

‘If nothing else works you could be a gigolo,’ Lina said. ‘Have fun while paying the rent.’

Chuan laughed as he got onto his scooter. He looked into the small disc of the rear-view mirror and smoothed his hair. Nothing in his behaviour indicated that he was perturbed by the news we had just received. His posture – upright, shoulders straight as if pinned to an invisible bar – made his body seem unbreakable, capable of withstanding anything that life could hurl at him, and yet it was this image of resilience that made me anxious; I was suddenly afraid that I would never see him as healthy and tenacious again; that if I left and returned the following year I would somehow find him diminished in a way that I couldn’t anticipate, and it was this lack of clarity that terrified me more than anything, this inability to see how the years would play out for us.

Lina held out her cigarette to Chuan. ‘You’re not too upset?’ she said, more quietly now.

He reached out to accept the cigarette and shrugged while taking a long drag. ‘I told you I was getting out of here anyway,’ he said. ‘In fact I’m going to see a place that Jessie found for me this evening.’

I saw the curious expression on Lina’s face, then on Chuan’s, and I could gauge, even while it was happening, how they would describe my behaviour in those moments when they spoke about me in the future. Teenage hysteria. Angry young man. Identity crisis. Delayed homesickness. He was just tired. Too much for a kid to process. All part of growing pains. It was just too hot that day. And maybe they were right, maybe it was a physical evolution stronger than me, or the effect of the weather. I couldn’t help my body producing tears, couldn’t help my hands bunching into fists despite trying to relax them, couldn’t help the feeling of intense embarrassment, the shame of not being as calm as they were. I had the distinct sensation of the air turning soupy and unbreathable, of being suffocated by the very thing that was keeping me alive. Just as Lina and Chuan couldn’t understand my rage – for that was what it was, I think – I couldn’t understand their stoicism, their refusal to fight the situation. There must be something I can do to change my parents’ minds, there must be something, there must be something. I kept repeating this to myself the way I did when I was a child, willing a solution to appear before me, all the while knowing that nothing would materialise. I turned to go back to the house and broke into a run almost immediately; I wanted to confront my parents and say . . . what? What words could I possibly draw from my blurry anger? Everything I could see felt tainted with my rage and disgust. The yard had never seemed so forlorn, the house so primitive, the vegetation that surrounded me so drab and ugly.

Lina and Chuan would describe how I was so slow and clumsy and only covered half the ground before Chuan caught up with me, grabbing me with both arms and holding me still, and that I didn’t even struggle but calmed down at once, like a household pet that makes a break for freedom only to discover that it doesn’t want to leave after all. They would remember it differently, almost as a joke, and if ever the subject came up in the future, they would tease me good-naturedly, as if to remind me of my former immaturity, now that we were all adults and capable of laughing at the ridiculous younger versions of ourselves, all elbows and tears and bad haircuts.

But even as Chuan held me and said something that I couldn’t hear because my face was pressed tightly against the damp fabric of his shirt and I was breathing too heavily, even then I knew that I would never fully be able to distance myself from the person I was at that precise moment, trapped by his own frustration, inexplicably powerless, incapable of exerting willpower over a situation, of finding a light-hearted thing to say, of shrugging off mishap. Later, older incarnations of that person would exercise greater mastery over his speech and gestures in interactions with other people, but occasionally that young, shapeless version of him would push through to the surface and take over. That person’s helplessness would be tied to a feeling of loss; of being unpicked, slowly, from their surroundings and from themselves, so that they became unmoored, even if just for a few minutes, standing at a bus stop or in the middle of a room into which they had just entered.

I kept holding on to Chuan even though I knew we could be seen from the house from where we were standing; even then, I was aware of what my parents might be seeing and thinking of me, but their opinion had become as meaningless to me as the hot dry air, irrelevant because it never changed. I realised I was standing lopsided on the ground. The strap on one of my sandals had snapped and my foot was placed awkwardly, half in, half rubbing against the dirt. I reached down and took it off, and then the other sandal, so that I could at least stand evenly. Chuan rubbed the top of my head and asked if I was all right, and I said – mumbled – yes, it’s just the heat that’s got to me. We walked back to Lina and she put her arm around me and said, ‘No big deal.’

I smiled and nodded. ‘I’m probably dehydrated,’ I added.

‘Why don’t you go into town and have lots of cold beer. It’s the best thing for cooling down the body. And God knows we all need a drink this evening.’

I asked Chuan for the keys and got on the scooter. I felt like being in front and feeling the wind on my face; I thought it would clear my head and help me think clearly again. He climbed on behind me and made another attempt at convincing Lina to come. She glanced up at the house and shook her head. ‘I’m going back into the war zone. Wish me luck.’

I started the motor and was just about to pull away when she turned back and said something, and when she saw that neither Chuan nor I could hear over the noise of the scooter, she shouted, Everything will be all right. She raised both hands in the air in an expansive double wave, more cheerful than she needed to be, and as I turned and rode down the track I held her words in my head and tried to believe they were true.

Fong tries to read Sui’s expression, but he can see nothing; she is as placid as ever. He realises that this is how she has been able to survive being a wife and a mother – by distancing herself from anything she finds difficult. She will go along with those who impose a stronger will than hers, whether it is her husband or her children; it is her defence strategy. She would rather give up her own rights than challenge Jack. While Jack speaks of his plans to sell the farm, she avoids Fong’s gaze, and her silence confirms something to him – that she has decided to side with her husband. She possesses the legal rights but has ceded the moral ones to him.

Later, Chuan comes into the garage where Fong is repairing a loose windscreen wiper on the car. What else is there to do but fix the broken pieces of his life? Pa, Chuan says. Framed in the doorway, his son looks tall, and made of an unshakeable substance, though maybe this impression of solidity exists only because Fong feels as though he himself is crumbling into tiny fragments. They stand, looking at each other, but neither man moves. They are not like the Lims, always touching. He and Chuan do not know how to do this, and it is too late to learn. Yet he is comforted by Chuan’s presence, watching over him as he mends a piece of plastic and metal that has needed attention for many weeks. Don’t worry, his son says, we will work things out.

I stood at the door of my parents’ bedroom as my mother packed her bags. She folded the clothes into neat squares and smoothed each one down before placing it into the old vinyl suitcases. ‘Better go prepare your own things instead of watching me all day,’ she said.

‘Why are we leaving so soon?’

‘Dad needs to get back. See if he can find work.’

She continued her task with almost mechanical calm, even when she was speaking to me. She took a small pile of my father’s briefs and proceeded to fold the awkward shapes into perfect little cubes, one by one until she could tuck them into a gap she had created amid the other clothes. I realised then that I had been observing her all my life; that my place in her world was at the threshold of the door, looking at her slightly removed, neither close nor distant, yet somehow tangled together in a way neither of us could articulate.

‘I think I’m going to stay a bit longer,’ I said. ‘School isn’t starting for a while.’

She didn’t look up, her hands still working smoothly. ‘Nonsense – how will you get home?’ she said, though I noted that she didn’t say no.

I could get a bus home from the little station in town, I explained, even if I had to change for another somewhere, or Chuan could drive me into the city, only forty-five minutes away, where there were many buses each day, and he would even wait until I was on the bus to make sure I got away safely. I’d leave in the morning and be home easily by dinnertime.

She made a low sound like En, which might have signified agreement just as easily as refusal, but in fact was somewhere in between. She was being called upon to make a decision, yet another one in a daily catalogue of decisions, and just at this moment, like so many other moments, she was too tired to do so; her mind was full of other considerations that jostled for space in her thoughts, and now here was Jay, her youngest, asking her for more. He was always asking for something that had a way of transforming itself into a burden; even the simplest request, like, Is there any more food had a habit, sometimes, of crushing her. I can see that clearly now – how much of a worry I was to her. Despite her serene, upright posture that never wavered despite the heat, she was wilting.

Downstairs, Yin was humming an indistinct tune. She had already packed her things earlier that morning and was now waiting patiently for our departure.

I left the room but was only halfway down the corridor when I turned back and paused again at my mother’s door. I felt that I should go in but I stood back, watching her again. She was standing up now, gathering her bottles of shampoo and lotions from the dressing table and taping them closed with a roll of Sellotape that she had brought for this purpose. I wanted to ask how she was feeling, if something was wrong. It would have been so easy to take the few steps towards her and hug her, and maybe that would have made us both feel better, but for some reason I remained at my place by the door and looked at her methodically sealing the bottles with tape.

Mum, I said; and again she made that noise, En. I asked her if she was all right and she said, Yes, why shouldn’t I be?

They recognise every sound that the land makes – the barely rustling trees in the daytime; the different birds that fly overhead at each segment of the day; the nightly chorus of jungle insects, where the trees are tall and dense; the lorries in the distance; the lone scooter picking its way along the bumpy track, which will either be Lina or Fong; the brief shivering rush of the leaves overhead in the rare puff of wind. But now there is a noise that is unfamiliar – a brutal intrusion.

Jay notices it first. He has his head on Chuan’s chest, and hears the sound as though refracted through Chuan’s body – his flesh, the mysterious spaces held within his bones – and is confused. He has been looking at the particular quality of Chuan’s skin, neither light nor dark, smooth nor rough, clammy nor dry, and he has been drawing his fingertips over it, trying to work out how he will remember it at a later time, what words he will use to describe it later. The blurry, dusky brown disc of Chuan’s nipple, too close to his eyes for him to focus. He starts to move his fingers towards it and just when he touches it, he hears the noise.

What’s that? he says, rising to a sitting position.

Chuan has been dozing on the blanket they have laid out in their spot next to the lake. The day is giving out, and soon they will be riding into town in the way that has become a comforting habit for them.

Chuan, wake up.

Yes, I can hear it. What’s going on?

I don’t know.

The sound begins with a mechanical stutter before rising to an angry whine. If machines had souls, Jay thinks, all their rage would be contained in this scream that is now drifting across the lake.

It’s a chainsaw, Chuan says, and now both boys are alert. They stand up and get dressed, pulling on their shorts and shoes and jogging through the undergrowth shirtless. Thorny branches reach out to snag them but by now Jay can’t feel the quick pain they inflict, he can only think that his hair is still wet with the water from the lake, and he likes the coolness that this brings to his body as he runs behind Chuan.

As they approach the source of the noise they slow down and, instinctively, crouch low. Despite the invasive loudness of the sound there is something surreptitious about it – they both know it is an odd hour to be cutting wood – and they feel that they must remain unseen. When they are close enough to see clearly through the gloom, for dusk is falling and the light is fading fast, they see a man urging a chainsaw into the trunk of one of the old tamarind trees. He is struggling – the trunk is thick and unyielding, and the chainsaw whines angrily without making much progress.

‘The fuck is your dad doing?’ Jay says.

Chuan shakes his head in reply. They watch Fong continue in his attempt to cut the tree down. His head is bowed in concentration, as if he has no choice but to continue, as though he has to destroy this tree or he will die. The chainsaw starts to cut through the wood but catches; and again Fong insists. All his fury is transferred to the machine, to the noise it makes. Finally the chainsaw breaks clean of the timber. The tree tips very slowly, as if to topple, but it pauses, branches caught in those of the adjacent trees, which prevent it from falling. Jay and Chuan can hear the snapping of twigs and of wood, but then a curious silence returns. Fong steps back and surveys the tree and, satisfied with its state, begins work on the next one.

When Jay and Chuan come back a few days later, all the tamarind trees will have been chainsawed to the ground, lying in uneven heaps as though a storm decided to wreak havoc on that precise part of the farm. The space left by the former canopy of branches lets in too much light and opens up the view to the lake, which will, from where they are standing, look like a small, flat stretch of swamp. Not knowing what to say as they pick their way through the fallen timber, Chuan will joke that Lina should come back and photograph the dead trees as part of her art project. Jay will trace the patterns on the fallen trees with his fingertips and recall the feeling of the rough crevices on his skin. They were sick and had to die anyway.

Like father, like son.

Sui watches Jay take his father in his arms for a quick goodbye, struck by how alike they are. She must be going mad again, because it seems to her that Jay has grown an inch or two in the last month and is now as tall as Jack, their slender frames a mirror of each other’s. Jay is hurried and anxious to get on with his day, with his life. It would suit him better if the family left quickly and without fuss, leaving him free to do as he pleases, now that he has found sources of distraction and amusement that Sui cannot guess, and which he doesn’t tell her about. In that way, too, he is like Jack: he has inherited his father’s need to be private.

It is the same with Chuan, that sweet boy who rejects his father but will, Sui notes with sadness, end up just like him, feckless and at the mercy of the world they live in.

Fathers and sons: they believe, furiously, that they are the opposite of each other, but they are in fact perfect reproductions of each other.

She watches Jay as he retreats to the house. What will he inherit from her, she wonders, as she gets into the car? She hopes it will be resistance, the capacity to withstand injury. But she is unsure of this, as she is of everything at this point in time.

We drove Lina to the city in Fong’s car, which we had taken without his permission. It was only for a quick trip, we reasoned, it wasn’t as if we were going far or for very long. She had decided to take the bus directly back to college in Penang, foregoing the ritual of a few days at home with the family before the start of the new semester. She didn’t know when she’d be back, seeing as she’d already lined up a part-time job during the next break, to help pay dorm bills and other expenses. She felt ready for the year, she said – the last school year of her life, as she described it, before real living could begin. My own education sprawled out before me and I couldn’t help but feel envious.

Even if the farm were sold, I said, one day I would get a job that paid me so much that I’d be able to come back and purchase the land from whoever owned it, and restore Chuan and Fong to it. Yes, I’d become a banker in Wall Street or Singapore and then I’d save us all, they joked; and in their joviality I saw how foolish I was to have been earnest. ‘Why not?’ I insisted. ‘Why do you think that’s impossible?’

‘Nothing’s impossible, mighty brother of mine,’ Lina said, reaching forward from the back seat to ruffle my hair. ‘Though somehow you don’t strike me as being a banker. You’ll just have to win big on the horses.’

‘How do you know I’ll still be in these parts?’ Chuan said. ‘Maybe I’ll follow you back up to Kuala Lumpur, once my money situation becomes more stable.’

I didn’t answer, keeping my hope to myself.

My parents and Yin had left earlier that afternoon, their departure occurring discreetly and without ceremony, as though they were keen not to upset the silence of the house. My mother gave me some money to buy my ticket back and, when my father wasn’t looking, pressed some notes into Lina’s palms and hurried away. ‘Mum,’ Lina called out. ‘Mum.’ She walked after our mother and circled her arms around her from behind. She rested her head lightly on my mother’s back and their embrace looked foreign to me, I realised, because it had been many years since I’d seen her do this. My mother held her and said something brief and soft, and then my father started up the car, its engine coughing to life.

Once they’d gone, we rang the station and found that there were buses that ran all the way to the far north, to Penang and beyond, and Lina wouldn’t even have to rush. I suggested going for a swim in the lake before she left but she said there was no point in wasting time. She chain-smoked three Marlboros while waiting for Chuan to drive us to Johor Bahru, taking drags so long and deep that I could see the tips of the cigarettes burning down and turning to ash. I told her to go slow and she replied, ‘It’s a long journey, I need to get my puffs in now.’

When we reached the station we found there were only expensive tickets left, on the air-conditioned coaches with tiny TV screens. The woman at the ticket counter showed us a photo of the interior of the bus, full of smiling passengers – a mother with a child pointing up at a screen that displayed a scene from Jurassic Park. The ticket cost more than she wanted to pay, but still not all that much money. She said she would text me when she arrived to tell me if the comfort justified the extra cost. I had a few more days before I had to make a similar journey north.

‘If I decide to go,’ I said. ‘But I might choose to stay.’

‘In which case,’ she said, ruffling my hair, ‘good luck with the rest of your life.’

We had an hour to kill before the coach left – too little time to go anywhere, so we sat on the row of plastic seats inside the waiting area next to the ticket office, where the air-conditioning worked badly and made the room smell damp and slightly mouldy, tinged with the smell of spices. Chuan tried to get us some drinks from the vending machine, but it kept spitting out the coins he fed into it and wouldn’t accept any notes. We watched the people gather slowly in anticipation of the coach’s departure – a family with five children, their plastic bags bulging with clothes and food; a glassy-eyed solitary man, with hair so thick and white it looked as though he was wearing a hat; two teenage girls adjusting their already impeccable hijabs; a few lone Indonesian men carrying only small, worn backpacks travelling north in search of work. We tried to guess what was going on in their lives: where they had come from, whether they were trying to escape or to find someone, whether they were in search of adventure or solace, and where they would spend the remainder of their years. We each had our own theories; we couldn’t agree on an ending for any of their stories.

When it was time to board the bus, Lina grabbed her bags, saying she wanted to get a good spot. I pointed out that her seat was numbered but she told me that these things mattered little – there was always room for manoeuvre once you got on board. She didn’t want to get stuck next to some sleazy guy and have to spend the next ten hours brushing off his hand and pretending to sleep. She’d been there before: doze off and you feel his fingers. Much better to sit with the sweet retirees on their way to see their illicit lovers a third their age (that was the story she had invented for them).

Chuan and I stood by as Lina queued to store her luggage in the hold. The ground was sticky with old diesel and the air smelled of burnt rubber. Just before she went up the steps, she gave Chuan a wave. ‘Bye, gigolo, have fun,’ she said. Then she turned to me and hugged me. ‘Goodbye, brother dearest,’ she said with exaggerated formality. I thought she was going to say something else but she held me for a few moments and then climbed up and in. We saw her talking to someone, negotiating a change of seats no doubt, before sitting down and sinking out of view.

Is this the last time.

It is not a question but a pronouncement, as though Chuan has already made up his mind.

Is this the last time what? Jay replies.

The last time we’ll be alone together. Chuan says this quite calmly, and Jay finds that he is hurt by the poise in Chuan’s voice.

Don’t be a pain, Jay says. Of course not.

Chuan says nothing.

They are sitting on a pontoon, in a sort of nature park that the town is famous for, arranged as a series of walkways and timber jetties along the river. It’s late and the inky darkness of the water is lit by thick masses of fireflies in the trees that line the riverbank. The light they produce seems both brilliant and unreal, their glow so intense and dispersed so widely in the branches that they must be produced by some artificial means. The park closed some hours ago, but Chuan knows a secret way in – a couple of years ago he worked for a few weeks as a waiter in the park café and is familiar with its entry points, both official and unofficial. He wanted to show Jay the town’s major attraction – only attraction, some might say – before Jay left, so they stole in through a disused gate and walked half a mile to where Chuan knows the fireflies are at their brightest.

I could stay, Jay says. In one year and two months’ time I’ll be eighteen and I can do what I want.

That’s in a year and two months’ time.

I can come back then.

You need to finish school and go to college. That’s what’s right for you.

Once I reach the age of majority, I can do whatever I please.

There’s the law, and there’s what is right.

No, Jay thinks: there is the law, and what is possible. What is practical. That’s what Chuan means. He says, You think I won’t be able to come back.

Chuan says, No, I mean, I think it’s not right for you to come back.

I can decide what is right for me, thank you very much, and you decide what’s right for you.

In the dazzling, eerie cloud of fireflies, tiny dots of light fade out and Jay wonders whether they are extinguished by death or something less definitive, fatigue or migration. He worries that they will all start to go out, signifying the end of a season – of many tiny lives. As if sensing Jay’s concern, Chuan says, Isn’t it incredible, this lasts all night.

I’m hungry, Jay says. They’ve had an early dinner, hours ago now, and his body feels hollow, aching. Growing pains, like his parents always say. There are empty spaces inside him that didn’t exist before. This emptiness feels like hunger but Jay thinks that it is really a longing, though he doesn’t know what he is longing for.

The day before I was due to leave, I went with Chuan to look at his new place. It was modest but clean, consisting of two rooms on the floor above a betting shop. It hadn’t been built as living quarters, and was more like storage space for whatever business operated from the ground floor, but it had a small bathroom and plumbing for a rudimentary kitchen that the landlord had installed. It wasn’t quite ready when we visited – some tiles had to be replaced in the bathroom and a window fixed – but Chuan would have the keys soon. The larger room at the front smelled faintly of the clogged drain that ran in front of the building, but the smaller room at the back had a view of an overgrown field fringed by banana trees heavy with fruit despite the drought. Half town, half countryside, Chuan said.

We had agreed that I would come back to visit him during my next break from school. Even if the farm hadn’t been sold he would be living in town by then, and there would – as I could see – be plenty of space. It was a plan that reassured us both, especially me. With his new apartment and its proximity to new, potential employment, I sensed that he was eager to push on and make a complete break from the farm and from his father. My presence would be a burden to him, and I saw how my enthusiasm would be added to the list of things that weighed down on him. It was better that I went away until he had found a new job. He couldn’t say how long it would take, and when he promised that we’d meet during my next vacation I knew it was his way of comforting me; of making the coming months feel bearable for both of us.

The cheapest tickets home were for the late buses, just before or after midnight, and we decided to spend our remaining day kicking around town instead of on the farm. I’d suggested going for a final swim in the lake but neither of us wanted to hang around longer than was necessary. Fong was there, looking at papers spread over the kitchen table and doing sums with the help of a calculator. I wasn’t used to seeing him in his metal-rimmed reading glasses, which aged him and made him look much slower and more hesitant than when he was out in the fields. I would hear him clicking his tongue and sighing as he made mistakes on the calculator and had to tap out the numbers again. He’d get the pages mixed up and be forced to rifle through them before picking out a sheet that he’d stare at as though deciphering a page of some sacred text. He would also fall asleep in the armchair in the living room at odd times – in the middle of the morning, or just before Chuan and I went out for the evening. I stole past his papers and saw that he was applying for bank loans and couldn’t get the figures to add up. If I could have spent only half an hour with him we could have made sense of his affairs, but Chuan said there was no point: Fong was a stubborn old man who would refuse my help.

Just before we were due to leave the farm I walked up to the lake because I wanted to fix it in my mind’s eye. I knew it was a sentimental thing to do, which is why I wanted to be on my own, without even Chuan to distract or make fun of me. A lot of the trees had been cleared in random patches and Fong had hired a small bulldozer that blocked the track, forcing me to walk around it on my way to the lake; but otherwise the land was as flat and tranquil as ever, the lake the same indistinct muddy hue as always. I realised that I was trying to commit every detail to memory, even though I’d vowed to return in just a few months. I was just about to turn seventeen, and at that age, what did I really know about
time?

I said goodbye to Fong, who reminded me cheerfully that I would always be welcome, and that I didn’t even need to ask him if I could stay. I could arrive unannounced, it would always be a pleasure. I joked that he was exaggerating, there was no need for that old-fashioned politeness, that we were beyond that traditional Chinese courtesy that required him to lay on a red carpet for visitors. We didn’t need to be so formal with each other, I said – we were friends.

He hesitated before smiling. Yes, he said, friends – but you should still come any time you want.

He went back into the house before Chuan and I even reached the car, and when I turned around to wave goodbye I saw only the veranda, which looked slightly lopsided, and the house rising above it. Nothing had changed since I’d arrived and maybe it never would.

The air around us was soft and heavy, and just then Chuan pointed to the hills in the distance, now darkened with rainclouds. He laughed as I clenched my fists in mock rage and banged them against the dashboard. ‘The moment I leave, it rains,’ I said. It would be nice to swim in the lake in a rainstorm, we agreed; the danger from the lightning would make it all the more exciting for us. We’d save it for next time, when I would make it a point to return in the middle of the rainy season. I stuck my arm out of the window and turned my palm against the wind, feeling it eddy through my fingers. The first drops of rain fell on my skin, faint and hesitant after the long months of drought.

On the way to town I told him to take the highway. I didn’t want to eat in the night market in the rain. I wanted us to keep driving, straight to the city. We could go to the bar that we’d visited before and dance for a few hours right up until it was time to get on the bus and Chuan said he liked the plan – why did departures have to be sad, why couldn’t we turn it into a party?

We arrived much earlier than last time. The car park was quiet, apart from a scattering of half a dozen cars, but the fluorescent blue lights that framed the doorway were already on, and we could hear the heavy beat of the music from inside, giving the impression that the evening was already in full flow. There weren’t many people around, but when we walked in, a few men at the bar and a small group seated at a table looked up and nodded in greeting as we walked past and I got the feeling that they recognised us. I waved as I went past and leaned against the bar with Chuan. ‘Same as usual?’ the barman said, even though I had no idea what my usual was, and he served us a couple of bottles of Pepsi, which was in fact exactly what I wanted. He asked if I was from out of town and I said I was, but that I visited these parts often. I’d be back soon. He raised his beer towards me and we clinked bottles. There was no one on the dance floor, it was too early, but I said to Chuan, ‘Come on, let’s do it,’ and we slipped into the little space in front of the karaoke machine. His body looked supple and quick, and I tried to match his smooth, flowing movements. Others gathered around us, and I felt the pleasant accidental bump of someone’s elbow or hip against me. Some talked as they danced, some sang out of tune. The disco lights came on. Kaleidoscopic colours swirled across Chuan’s face. He leaned towards me and said something, but I couldn’t hear it over the music.

Acknowledgements

Tahmima Anam, Charles Buchan, Sarah Chalfant, Bernard Chauly, Chong Siew Ying, Michelle Kane, DD Johnson, Jackie Ko, Huan and Angela Lim, Édouard Louis, Ian Teh.

The initial pages of this novel, and the series it anticipates, were conceived of during a fellowship at the Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris. My thanks to: Judith Ginsberg, Paul Leclerc, Mark Mazower, Marie d’Origny.

About the Author

TASH AW is the author of four novels, including We, the Survivors, and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier, both finalists for the Los Angeles Book Prize. His work has also won the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes, an O. Henry Award and twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His fiction has been translated into twenty-three languages.

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