And then she brings out my notepad and tells me to position the point of a pencil on it. She tells me that she will teach me how to draw the virus. So I can understand its dimensions. She holds my hand and then tells me to close my eyes. I tell her that I am afraid of going blind, I have read before that it is one of the complications. But she tells me to concentrate. She places her hand on mine and then keeps it there. She doesn’t move my hand at all, just holds it with the pencil snug between my fingers.
“There,” she says, and at this point I wake up. I narrow my eyes to the harsh light in my room. I realise that I have been crying, and that tears have fallen down my face, not in the usual way, but down the sides of my eyes towards my ears. The eighth storey light is still on. I close my eyes for a few seconds and then open them. The light has still not gone out.
I might not be around when it finally does. Or I just might. It doesn’t matter anymore.
WINNERSIt was Shirley who picked up the telephone. At that time she was in the study room (that was what her husband called it even though nobody did any serious studying inside it), folding clothes. She placed them into stacks: trousers (which kept slipping out of the pile because they were shiny polyester ones), blouses, panties, skirts, briefs. She noticed that on some of her husband’s briefs there was a bump at the front. She tried pressing it down but realised that the cloth was already set that way. She touched the deformed cotton again, like a child pressing her father’s bruise. She laughed a little and that was when the telephone rang.
“Hello?” she went.
“Hello, is this Mrs Lee Swee Lin? Hi, I am from East Lion Marketing and your number has been specially picked for our prize. We have two return tickets for you if you can come down to our office to collect it. Are you working Mrs Lee?” The voice was that of a woman’s and it went very fast.
“I’m not working,” Shirley replied. “Sorry. Can you hold on please? Please hold on.” Shirley didn’t feel comfortable talking to a stranger in English. Even the name Shirley was something she had given herself while she was working as a salesgirl. They had wanted to make a name tag for her and she had asked that the name on it be Shirley. “Shirley is my Christian name,” she told everyone. After some thought she realised that it wasn’t right because she wasn’t Christian herself. She didn’t know what she was, just someone who didn’t believe or pray very much, there were so many other things to do. Even when she got ill she only thought of her grandma and her childhood. Shirley was just an English name. “Ingrish name,” her colleagues would say, “better to put on name tag, just one word, and if customer is tourist, won’t be shy to call you by your name.” Shirley reflected on how even with her name tag pinned on her red vest that went over her white blouse, nobody had ever called her by her name before. She was either “Miss” or they avoided addressing her altogether.
Shirley walked into the master bedroom where her husband Edward was playing Super Mario Brothers on his Nintendo set. The screen was making gobbling and tinkling sounds. They had a television set in their bedroom, and Shirley recalled how they used to watch episodes of ‘Golden Girls’ together.
“Edward!” she called.
“Who’s it?” he asked her, not taking his eyes away from the screen.
“Important!” We win something… this woman on the phone.”
“Does she want to speak to me?”
“You talk to her!”
“Why can’t you do it… I’m busy.”
“I don’t know how to say!”
“You don’t know what to say?”
“I don’t know how to say.”
“You don’t know how to speak.”
“Yah.”
Edward pressed a button on his game pad and the screen froze. He took the telephone from Shirley’s hands. Shirley took a look at the screen and saw a small man with a moustache suspended in air, his short legs hovering over a manhole. She found herself wishing, “Don’t fall in. Don’t fall. Stay like that.” Edward walked out of the room, a habit of his. He liked walking around the house if he was on the phone, never settling down at one place, making circles around whatever furniture they had left. Shirley looked at the television screen again and then at the game pad. She wanted to press a button on it to see if she could make the manhole disappear, or even the man. Edward had shown her how to play the game once and she recalled laughing as the character on the screen smashed against spinning coins and made them vanish with a lilting tune.
When Edward came back into the room he was frowning. He didn’t have to whisper, there was nobody else in the house who could hear them, but he did.
“You know what?” he asked.
“What?”
“We just won something.”
“What did we win?”
Edward’s frown had gone and Shirley saw the smile that was hiding behind it.
“You know we’ve always wanted to go on a holiday?” Edward asked.
Shirley looked at her husband guardedly. She tried to read his eyes. She could only see the childlike enthusiasm in them. She breathed in. One thing she learnt during their eight years of marriage was that enthusiasm was all right, if only one of them had it. Once it was shared by both, then it would set the wheels of disappointment in motion.
“Tell me,” said Shirley.
“The woman on the phone, she gave me an address. If we go
