“If only she understood,” Michelle moaned.
“For some people, however hard they try, they won’t understand,” May-Lin told her.
“Angela’s not like that.”
“How do you know?”
“Trust me, I know. We’re very close,” Michelle replied.
“But not close enough,” May-Lin answered back.
Michelle put down the phone.* * *The next day, the two girls went to the HMV record store again. May-Lin didn’t know in the beginning that it was supposed to stand for “His Master’s Voice”, and was shocked when Michelle said it stood for “Her Majesty’s Vagina”. Their exams were over, and they were just waiting for the holidays to begin. Everyone in their polytechnic was getting restless, and one of the ways they showed their impatience was by hanging out in Orchard Road after school.
Michelle was wearing a blue and white tie-dye sheath dress, and May-Lin was in her usual T-shirt and pants ensemble. Michelle also had on a pair of strawberry earrings. Michelle bought a Nina Simone CD whereas May-Lin got herself a Vanessa-Mae.
“Nina Simone’s got a really low voice,” Michelle told MayLin.
“Really?” May-Lin asked.
“Very low… I like,” Michelle said.
After they paid for their CDs they went to the toilet. MayLin half expected it to happen because Michelle had called her to complain about Angela the night before. It always happened that way. What she couldn’t get from Angela she would later be able to obtain second-hand from May-Lin. May-Lin would be there to lick her wounds for her. So the two girls locked themselves up in a corner cubicle and started undressing each other. They didn’t know how they got to be so daring. But Michelle had read somewhere that there was no law against two women behaving improperly with each other in public places. The Queen couldn’t imagine what two women could possibly want from each other. It gave an almost poetic significance to how the HMV toilet was often used for their amorous rendezvous, considering how Michelle had once jokingly explained to May-Lin what HMV stood for.
After it was all over, May-Lin held Michelle in a clumsy embrace.
“Michelle, do you love me?” she suddenly asked.
Michelle kept quiet.
“Michelle,” May-Lin asked again, tracing a spiral, delicate as a snail’s shell, on her shoulder, “do you think we could be together? Why aren’t we together?”
Michelle pulled her head away and looked at May-Lin.
“May-Lin, you know you’re not my type.”
“Then why do we do this?”
Michelle smiled at her.
“I don’t know, May-Lin. But you like it right? You don’t want me to stop? You don’t want me to go away?”
“Then what’s your type? Angela?”
“Yes. Don’t you think she’s pretty?” Would you go for her too?”
May-Lin nodded.
“But don’t try,” Michelle said, “we’re supposed to be friends. Friends don’t go for the same person.”
“She’s straight, Michelle,” May-Lin said. Her voice was becoming softer, more defeated.
Michelle leaned over and placed her cheek against MayLin’s mouth. May-Lin kissed it and then squashed her nose against it, inhaling deeply, smelling in the powdery smell of rouge. Then Michelle drew away and looked at her best friend.
“I still think that you need concealer.”
But she said it so tenderly. May-Lin felt a chill, and a draught that stirred the dust in a house with a thousand open windows. But no door.
“What’s wrong?” Michelle asked.
“Let’s go outside.”
Michelle followed May-Lin out of the toilets and eventually out of the record store. The night air held the smell of a rain that had just passed. The two girls occupied a spot near some shrivelled plants. Just opposite them, a couple of waiters, still in their aprons, were taking a fag break. However they soon realised that with cigarettes dangling from their mouths, they didn’t have a lighter between them.
“Miss,” one of them, a Malay waiter with an earring in his left ear, approached May-Lin. “Got lighter or not?”
May-Lin passed her translucent lavender lighter to the waiter.
“Thanks Miss,” he said.
“You can keep it,” May-Lin replied.
“No, it’s okay.”
“I don’t smoke,” she told him. What she didn’t tell him was that she didn’t have a need for that lighter anymore. It had served its purpose. A night ago, she had set fire to her organiser, muttering to herself that all that was history, there was too much baggage, she had to learn to start anew. She had also realised that Michelle was right in calling it a diary. It would have been different if it were just an organiser, the loss would be just that of routine, of a predictable future, a momentary severance with contacts. But she had actually burned a diary, and that was why as she watched the flames grope across its weathered leather cover, the pain was unbearable.
“What happened just now?” Michelle asked.
“You can’t remember?” May-Lin asked back, smiling.
“No, not that. Why were you crying?”
“Michelle,” May-Lin said.
“Yes, why?”
“Do you remember when we went to Boat Quay the last time? There was this booth, this stupid Japanese machine. You put in five one dollar coins and it would take a picture of you and a picture of me. And then the computer would put the pictures together and show us what our baby would look like. I remember that I wanted a girl but you said a son would be better. So I let you. I let you press the button.”
“Waste of money,” Michelle said.
“And you asked me to take off my specs. You said the baby would look good if she had my eyes. And so it took both our photos.”
Michelle didn’t seem to be listening anymore. She was looking at the two waiters who were fagging, wreaths of smoke surrounding them. One of them was squatting and looking up at his friend, the Malay waiter. The latter was imitating someone, who by the looks it of it, was hunchbacked and had one
