“Yes, I think you should further develop yourself,” he said. “Your English is so good what. But you should study law. You’ll make more money.”
Spoken like the engineer he was. Pragmatic. It should have rung warning bells. The only books he read were his engineering books, whereas I couldn’t live without reading stories. I didn’t think it would matter. At that point, I was so lost in the idea of being loved, as I had never thought I could be loved. I couldn’t believe someone as successful as he was would even look at me. Engineers were much favoured by the country at the time, as Singapore needed lots of them in manufacturing and building. I was awed. I wished I could tell Fatima.
“Do you like horror movies?” Boy Friend asked.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “My father introduced them to me. I get frightened but like them all the same.”
Of course, I didn’t know then that all boys took girls on their first date to horror movies so that the girls would cling to them when terrified. Duh! How would I know? He was my first boyfriend and my first love. We were not yet at the stage where we could publicly hold hands before getting engaged. But I do know that love can be transformative. Because I was loved, I felt myself to be beautiful. At last my father’s words were beginning to weaken their hold on me. Or so I thought.
“There’s a good movie coming up, called The Exorcist…”
“Oh, I read about that,” I said, trying to sound intelligent. “It’s based on a 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty. It’s about a 12-year-old girl who is possessed and how her mother engages the priest to exorcise the devil. Very scary.”
“You want to go?” Boy Friend asked. “We can go in my car. It’s showing at the Jurong Drive-In. Have you been there before?”
If he was out to impress me, he had succeeded. I had always wanted to go to Jurong Drive-In since it opened in July 1971. I had only read about it in the papers. Located at Yuan Ching Road in Jurong, next to the Japanese Gardens, the place was 5.6 hectares in size and was considered the largest drive-in in Asia, as it could hold 900 cars and had a sheltered area for 300 walk-ins. It was owned and managed by Cathay Organisation, which borrowed the idea from O’Halloran Hill Cinema in Adelaide, Australia. The opening was officiated by the Minister of Culture Jek Yeun Thong, and the first film that was screened was Doctor in Trouble, featuring British comic entertainers Leslie Philips and Harry Secombe. The proceeds from the opening night were donated to the Jurong Town Creche.
My mother nearly keeled over when I announced that a boy wanted to take me out.
Third Elder Brother said, “What kind of boy is he?”
Brothers took on the role of the father to vet their sisters’ boyfriends in our time. Third Elder Brother had recently got engaged to Sister-in-Law-To-Be from posh Bukit Timah, who worked as an Administrative Officer in PUB. When I gave my mother and him Boy Friend’s credentials, they were impressed.
“Ask him to come in first and let me meet him before I decide,” Mak said.
Boy Friend passed the test. But he had to bring me back home before 11pm.
I have a boyfriend. I have a boyfriend! I sang quietly in my head as Boy Friend drove his Ford Cortina the long journey to Jurong. The car was very comfortable and seemed very luxurious to me. I hadn’t been to Jurong before. It seemed like an ulu place far, far away from Kampong Potong Pasir, on the northwest side of our island. Houses and towns gave way to trees and more trees. Then we reached the industrialised part of Jurong, and I thought it looked ugly, with its large areas of concrete blocks. For a moment, I was horrified. Were these the kind of blocks that were going to replace our beloved village of attap houses in Kampong Potong Pasir?
I thought the drive-in would charge by the car rather than by the number of persons in the car. But Boy Friend shelled out $4, as each ticket per person cost $2. What a treat! Each single ticket was the price of a meal. The place looked like a giant open-space car park, with more and more cars streaming in. The usher gave us instructions and directions. Vendors were plying the people in parked cars with offers of snacks and ice-cream. Boy Friend drove the car carefully till he found a good spot in the middle of the arena.
“The screen is 47 feet by 100 feet, and is tilted downwards at an angle of 6½ degrees, so we will be able to see clearly from here,” explained Boy Friend in his engineer voice. “Those are speaker stands. But we also have individual car speakers which we can fix here on our window so we can hear better.”
“What happens if it rains?”
“Uhh, we use our windscreen wipers lah” he said, as if he hadn’t thought of it.
Would we have to peer through the rain through each swipe of the windscreen wipers? If people had passengers at the back, how would they be able to see the screen clearly? I was curious to know. But it was too new in the relationship to press for a further explanation. Besides, I didn’t want to show my ignorance. I was just going to enjoy myself. It was quite a novelty to watch a movie from the privacy of one’s car. The car gave us a sense of us being on our own, though we were surrounded by 899 cars!
The film was really spine-tingling, raising goosebumps all over my arms.
