“Ma, tuition teacher want to use the phone,” I told her.
My mother gave me a concerned look, and then immediately told her friend that she needed to go. She said an important call was coming in. I didn’t know why she couldn’t just say someone needed to use the phone. As I walked back into my room, I realised that I was walking in a funny way, not the usual manner, almost as if I wanted to appear confident. Then when I spoke it was as if my voice had some kind of puton American accent.
“Er, Chris, you can use the phone now.”
As I settled back into my chair, I wished that we had a different telephone for guests. My mother had bought a Garfield phone, and his eyelids would rise if you lifted the receiver off his paw. It looked funny the first time we saw it in the store, and that was why my brother and I insisted my mother buy it. My brother had said the words, “Very cute, Mak,” over and over and after a while he made it sound more longing than wistful. We also made her buy a rooster alarm clock that crowed in the morning. But now it seemed like a childish phone, something not fit for a guest to use.
“Cute phone,” Chris said when he came back.
“We last time had a normal type of phone, but that one spoiled.”
“Well, I mean, Garfield’s cute.”
“Yah.”
“So, where do you want to start? Any problems?”
When I showed Chris my report book I saw his face change. He bit his lower lip and nodded to himself. As his eyes roved over the page, he lifted his eyebrows at certain points.
“My teacher last year sick, so there was this new teacher who took over,” I explained.
“Really?”
“And he didn’t know how to teach. Almost the whole class fail Maths. It’s very hard to switch after you’re used to one style of teaching.”
“Sure.”
I didn’t know what else to say. Chris looked up from my report book and looked around the room. I was sure he spotted the no-brand badminton rackets on my bed, the poster of Cantona that had Scotchtape across it, because my brother had one day torn it in half during an argument. He started looking at the desk and he saw a few S-League stickers, a keychain that said ‘I Love Malaysia’ and my pencil holder where almost half of the pens inside were uncapped or had gone dry.
“Chris, just now your girlfriend page ah?”
“Something like that.”
“Wah. Steady˚ already or not?”
“Two years.”
“Wah. Eh, Chris, what do you think ah, about people, 16, 17 year old, having girlfriend? So many of my friends got girl already.”
“Well, it’s up to them.”
“But I think if young you should study first. I mean, girls can come later. Chris you got girlfriend or not when you were 16?”
“You know I have about an hour and a half to go through your Maths with you.”
I felt myself blush and hesitantly showed Chris my Maths textbook. As he flipped the pages he kept asking me if I was comfortable with the various chapters. That was the first time I had heard anyone use the word “comfortable” when talking about Maths. That was something new. I frowned at each chapter he pointed out, and then I made up my mind not to take any chances. If I wasn’t sure about it I was going to say so. That was what my father was paying this guy 45 dollars an hour for. When he was finished Chris said, “We have a lot of work to do.”
Over the next hour, Chris made me do some examples from the book. The first topic was ‘logarithms’. As I was doing the sums, he would tap his fingers on the desk. He didn’t seem the sort to be able to keep still. His feet were crossed and knocking against the dinner chair leg. I found out that I actually didn’t know how to do the sums, and at different times, I tried to catch his eye to show that I was having trouble. I would write a few numbers and signs, and then cancel them out angrily. Chris was in a world of his own, staring blankly into space. Suddenly he said, “I miss chewing gum.”
“You can take those,” I suggested.
“Can I?”
“Yah, take as many as you want.”
Chris took one spearmint and one peppermint.
“You know what I miss most? When you have chewing gum in your mouth and then you’re drinking some cold drink. Like iced Coke. The gum hardens inside your mouth. You have to chew on it hard to get it soft all over again.”
“Chris, I’m not sure about these sums.”
“Okay, let’s see what you have.”
It turned out that I got every sum wrong. Chris patiently explained to me how logarithms worked, the laws I would have to memorise, and he showed me a few “shortcuts” and “tricks”. He stayed on for 15 minutes overtime. When he was done, I shook my head and wanted to ask why I had to attend all those boring lessons when everything could be explained so clearly by him. Maths suddenly seemed easy then, everything followed patterns, and if you knew the pattern, you were safe. When he walked out into the living room it was dark. My mother had a habit of not switching on the living room lights; since she was young, she preferred watching the television in the dark. On the screen was another episode of Hotel, this soap opera on Malaysian television. A Malay man with a moustache was sitting down and smoking a pipe. She asked me about payment, and I told her what Chris had told me, that he would collect only after four lessons. I told her something else, too.
Chris was looking for his shoes, and then my mother took them out from under the
