My grandchildren happened to do this quite a number of times after that, and one day I met my neighbour, the wife, at our corridor twisting the tap back.
“Someone’s been playing with our water.”
“Yes, there are naughty kids around here.”
“This isn’t the first time it’s happened.”
“There are naughty kids. Sometimes they pee on the stairs.”
“It’s such a shock to turn on the tap and then find there’s no water.”
“Children can be naughty,” I told her. “Oh, my mother used to keep these flowers when we had a garden.”
“Yes, it’s very hard to grow.”
“Most people will just grow the usual kinds, but I suppose if you have the patience, you can grow anything.”
“There’s nothing much to do at home anyway.”
“I think in this whole corridor these are the nicest flowers.”
“You think so?”
“You don’t find flowers like these around anymore.”* * *It was classified as a murder, which is obvious, because how many people would kill themselves in front of a stranger’s house with seven stab wounds? It was something about bad debts and trying to run away and the killer being still at large. The man was in his late 30s, and for the next few days I tried to look for his obituary in the papers but I couldn’t find it. Which could mean either that he had very few relatives, or that they were embarrassed or scared for their own lives. The man didn’t live in our block. He had a lot of bad debts and he was in his late 30s; every single paper I bought since we came back said the same thing. If I was not in a hotel room I would have been in the crowd. If there was a police line we would be standing behind it, the brave ones in front, the cowards behind, the bravest ones further behind to make sure nobody would run away from the gruesome scene.
If I was at home when it happened, I don’t know what I would have done. So what if there was screaming. Along our corridor there was a lot of screaming. Especially from the house just next to the one at the end, where there is this woman with a loud voice. I heard that last time, this woman had a mother, very old, sitting in a wheelchair. She often brought the mother to the park in front, the one where sometimes after it rained, the bougainvillea petals would litter the tarred footpaths as if a parade had just passed. So while pushing the mother she would tell stories, and since the mother was sitting below on the wheelchair and hard of hearing, this woman would raise her voice. She would say things like, “look at the grass, they just cut it,” as if her mother was blind as well. “Look at the patterns on the grass!” Even after the mother died, this woman still talked as if everyone was deaf. Anyway when she starts scolding her children the whole corridor can hear what is going on. “You don’t make me angry, why you must always make me angry. Why you all cannot see me happy, cannot see me rest. I don’t want to beat you, why you must make me beat you?” I once passed her house, and I saw the bare living room, a few toys on the floor, and on the wall, at a child’s height, two posters, one on the alphabet and another on the times table. I couldn’t remember which one it was that had a pink octopus on it.* * *“Mak, why do you keep looking out of the window?”
“Nothing.”
“We’ll be reaching Singapore soon. Do you want to order anything?”
“I’m just thinking.”
“Thinking of what?”
“Who’s taking care of our plants.”
“Mak, one week won’t kill them. Anyway we watered them before we left.”
“You don’t know those plants. You don’t know what they need.”* * *The day they found out my grandchildren were playing with their taps was the day things happened. That night, I couldn’t sleep because someone’s car alarm had gone off, and even though we lived on the seventh floor the sound still reached us: the shrill persistent wail, the boring tune played over and over. So I got up from my mattress and went to the toilet. When I turned on the tap it made a squeaky sound and then that hollowness, waiting for the sound of water, the feeling that instead of delivering water the tap had sucked in all sound.
At that moment I felt like an old woman.
The week after, my grandchildren confessed to have played with the water pipes. I had made up my mind to apologise to my neighbours one day and when I walked out of my house, I saw their daughter opening the door. She had a boy with her who was holding her by her hips. She saw me, and the look she gave was something I couldn’t forget, a vengeful look, as if I had stolen something from her, as if I had caused her life to take a wrong and irreversible turn. She told the boy to go home, and when he went off he also gave me yet another look, but by that time I had already realised that the girl’s parents weren’t home.
“Where’s your mother?”
“She’s not here.”
“I want to see your mother.”
“About what?”
“About something.”
“About what?”
“About… about naughty children around here.”
The next few days became stranger and stranger. For one thing, our slippers went missing, but we would find
