The boy shook his head, more forcefully this time. “You wait for me.” He sounded desperate. He dropped the ‘t’ in ‘wait’.
“I have to go. Look, my friends are waiting.” Salim gave the boy an expression that insisted he was being reasonable.
“Just wait a while. Wait a while only.” The boy was unzipping his bermudas. Salim could see the boy’s white cotton briefs.
Salim clutched the hefty boy by his left shoulder and tried to push him. He resisted. Salim suddenly realised he did not want to see the boy’s penis. He was a Chinese boy, there was foreskin on his penis. He also smelt of stale sweat. Salim tried harder, and eventually the boy was jerked aside.
Salim turned to the boy. “There’s nothing, just go, okay?”
The boy stared at Salim. He shuddered for a second, and then Salim saw a dark patch blooming on the front of his bermudas, and streaks trickling down his left thigh. Salim watched in shock, and for a moment remembered that sensation, the warmth of urine haloing his legs as he stood alone with the cold currents of the seas lapping around him.
“I ask you to wait.” The boy was sobbing now, his breath jumping in starts.
Salim turned away from the boy and pulled the right side of the door. The boy made way for him and went to the washbasin to scoop some water to bathe his thigh. He was also wiping his face with the back of his hands. When Salim got back to the table he grinned at everyone and asked, “What did I miss?”* * *“Wahlau, seow˚ man, that woman,” Wei Cheng’s voice was on the other line, and in the background Salim could hear Wei Cheng’s father singing karaoke.
“Yah,” Salim replied. He was in his room using the cordless phone. His computer was on but he had not touched it for the past 20 minutes.
“Beat the boy until like that. But the boy also a bit Chao Yang ah?”
Salim wanted to protest but held himself back. There would be a time to talk to his best friend about it later. Chao Yang was a name of a school that taught educationally subnormal children. Both of them often passed it on their way to the Language Centre, where they took French lessons. There was that time when Wei Cheng had asked Salim what the word ‘retarded’ was in French.
“Damn violent, man,” Wei Cheng went on. “Seow, man that woman. Her son just pee in his pants only what. She can go to the shop and buy another pair what, right?”
“Hey,” Salim interrupted, “project how?”
“Like that lor.˚ Don’t worry lah. We’ll meet the deadline. At the most ask for one or two days extension.”
“Okay… Wei Cheng ah?”˚
“Yeah?”
It seemed as if the world suddenly got quieter. Salim was glad for the hum of the computer.
“Do you think I’m a bad person?”
“Why? Aiyah,˚ why ask me this type of question?”
“Because I’ve heard that when bad people die they die with their eyes open.”
“Wah… I never see before. So that means this whole world everyone good people lah?”
“I don’t know. Do you think…”
“No lah, you’re not.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re my friend what!”
Salim leaned his cheek hard against the telephone, and managed to press the button that disengaged the call.
There would be time later for explanations, or excuses. He didn’t feel like playing computer games anymore, and moved to the window. He pressed his face against the grilles and they bit into his cheeks, cold. He shut his eyes against the wind and the sounds of vehicles on the street.
Suddenly he missed the sea and realised that he had not been to the beach for a year. He thought for a moment and it came back to him; the last time he swam at the East Coast Beach he almost drowned. A Chinese man had seen him flailing in the water and had brought him back to shore. The man had pumped his chest until he spat out seawater and gasped. He remembered the man’s face, frowning, the way people who were praying often looked. He recalled that the man was wearing a gold chain. While he was being brought to life, Salim’s eyes had been wide open: gazing at the casuarina treetops, the edge of the sun eclipsed by the man’s head, the blindingly blue sky.
He had never told anyone about that day.
Salim reached out for the telephone and dialled Wei Cheng’s number. The ringing went on for one whole minute, and then another, by which time Salim was gripping the handset. He paced up and down his room, and realised there was a tightening in his loins.
“Wei Cheng,” he muttered into the receiver. His voice became more urgent. “It was me. It’s me. Pick up the phone. Please.”
VIDEOIf not for some last minute changes Maimon would have been Hajah Maimon Binte Putih by now. She would have been able to sit in her living room while passing trinkets to her daughter, her relatives, neighbours even. She would go as far as to offer some of her souvenirs from Mecca to Zainab, who once spread the word that Maimon’s husband was a divorcee, as if there was something shameful about that. She would let Zainab have her pick of a tasbih, the Muslim rosary with 33 beads, or a prayer mat with a tapestry of the Ka’abah.˚ The holy zam-zam˚ water she would store in plastic bottles to distribute to her friends’ grandchildren. She would encourage them to drink the water before their exams, so they will be terang hati or have hearts incandescent with the light of knowledge.
The last minute change was of course something that only the rain could bring. Maimon had been awoken by the sound of water on glass, slapping on brick, a sound which she had never gotten used to. This was because her earliest memory of rain was the sound of droplets on a zinc roof. “It’s raining,” she told her sleeping husband, Abu Bakar, as she got
