Sleep does not come over her. Instead, Rosminah feels a numbness that creeps up her legs, like sap, up her thighs and stomach. She winces and wonders whether it was true what her mother told her last time, that if you feel your body being frozen, paralysed, it means that an evil spirit is sitting on you. She hears frantic echoes panting, in her ears, and struggles to steer her mind away to other things.
Her friend gave her something for her birthday. She will give something back for Kala’s birthday. It is only fair.
Rosminah then reaches her hands out as if in fear that the numbness would finally reach them. She gathers them from the quicksand of her body and brings them, trembling, to her face. She whispers, “Help me God,” before reaching out with her left hand towards her husband’s side. In the darkness she feels for his pocket, gently. She slips in her fingers and feels the crisp 50-dollar note tucked inside. Just as she is about to pull it out, her husband clasps her hand with his own and then sighs. He says something, and then Rosminah realises that the numbness has gone, has leaked away as if through a hole that has been punctured in her side. She hears a sharp ring and knows it is the sound of the alarm clock in the children’s room.
In the kitchen, all Rosminah can concentrate on are her hands. Open the bread bin. Take out the butter and kaya˚ from the refrigerator. Scoop the Milo into the washed-out Nutella mugs. As she is tying Siti Nuraini’s hair, she hears Mohd Rosli asking her:
“Mak, why are you smiling?”
After sending her children off at the door, Rosminah walks into the kitchen again. She looks out of the window and sees a sweeper pushing a trolley with rubbish bins on it. Rosminah opens the window grilles. She then leans out and feels a strange wind blowing. She walks back to the cabinet and unplugs the sandwich maker, the same one she had used to prepare her children’s breakfast. Her 50 dollars is still in her husband’s pocket. When he held her hand, he had asked, “Rosminah, sayang,˚ you never sleep one whole night?”
Rosminah stretches her arms out of the window. The sandwich maker is heavy in her hands. Then she lets her fingers go. They obey her will. The sandwich maker falls, followed by its wire and plug trailing behind it, and for a moment, Rosminah thinks that she sees Kala’s ponytail plummeting downwards. Rosminah closes her eyes and clenches her fists against the ledge. She feels something within her fly out: a lightness that lasts as long as is necessary until a bang and a shout force her to open her eyes.
She looks down to see Mohd Rosli comforting Siti Nuraini, and she sees the wreckage she has made, an enamelled casing splintered into innumerable pieces. Siti Nuraini is crying, partly because of the shock but mostly because she had recognised the sandwich maker. Mohd Rosli looks up at his kitchen window and sees Rosminah, looking down. Their eyes meet from that distance, and Rosminah mouths something. She sees on her son’s face the expression she had wanted to see on Kala’s; that disbelief, the shock of identifying her as Rosminah, quiet Rosminah, a birthday wish stuck between her sobs.
DISCOSometimes when the wind was low outside the house, Robert would lie on his bed wondering if he had done the right thing. He thought about the woman who had been his wife for five years and he thought about the night he had packed his suitcase to leave. He remembered the look on her face when he had told her. He had not actually told her, he had written a note which he left at her dressing table under a jar of Pond’s Cold Cream. After he came home from his office, she confronted him about it. That was when he decided to tell the truth. What Robert remembered most was folding his clothes inside their bedroom (mostly shirts he would need to wear to work for the next few weeks; he did not believe in taking leave for what was just a domestic crisis) and hearing her cry in the living room. It seemed then that they were living in separate houses and he was listening to a neighbour making inaudible noises, so plaintive and private, that to eavesdrop would have been a childish and insensitive thing to do. She did not even have the lights on.
Being 35, Robert knew how late it was to have arrived at such decisions. But it was something that had always stood at the back of his mind. Robert always thought to himself that it was a tumour, and the only way to heal was to admit to himself that it was there and that if he did not do something about it then it would keep growing. It would take over his body, and one day his wife would find him balled up on the bed, caved in by the realisation that the life he had assumed was false. Everything in his house: from the albums (embossed with titles like Sweet Memories and Floral Design Co.) under the coffee table, to the Pomeranian that had to be fitted with a bell as
