O Chin - Now That It's Over

Back at the hotel, Daniel asked Ai Ling whether she was up for a drink at the bar. She hesitated, then shook her head. Daniel looked puzzled, thrown off his axis, unable to reconcile what had preceded—a good meal together, the conversation, the hand-holding—with Ai Ling’s returning taciturn behaviour. Not knowing how to pull out of the situation, she stretched upwards and kissed him lightly on the cheek. His eyes brightened fleetingly with a flare of hope, but she had already extricated herself, and was moving towards the staircase. She heard Daniel calling out to her, but she did not turn around.

In her room, Ai Ling sat on the sofa and gazed out the windows. When her mind had finally settled into its usual flow, she got up and called the reception from the bedside phone, informing them that she would be checking out in the morning and enquiring about the coach schedule back to Bangkok. Done with the call, she started to pack her things.

In the early morning, Ai Ling woke up feeling nauseated, and threw up what she had eaten the night before. Dousing her face with cold water, Ai Ling tried to hold down the waves of sickness that continued to stir her insides, even when she had nothing left to vomit. The pain came and went like serrating pulses of light. She returned to bed and fell back to sleep. When she woke an hour later, she felt much better, returned to her usual self.

With some time to kill before she had to check out at eleven—she wanted to avoid Daniel by all means—Ai Ling decided to go for a swim in the sea. She put on her one-piece and headed down to the beach. The day held the promise of fair weather, the air skin-sobering cool with a hint of a bite, still retaining the memory of the rain. The beach was empty except for a handful of early risers doing their morning exercise.

Putting her towel down on the sand, Ai Ling surveyed the beach from one end to the other: no other swimmer in sight. She stepped to the water line, then plunged straight in, giving herself entirely to the nerve-numbing shock of the cold water. For a few seconds, her body only registered the biting pain that surrounded it before a blossoming sensation of warmth started to spread out as she moved her arms and legs, pushing her body onwards. She swam for a long time without stopping. When she paused to look back at the shore, everything seemed so distant—the town on the coast, the people, the hills that rose in the south. Apart from her sonorous breaths, the sea was silent. With her feet hovering in a colder, deeper part of the water, Ai Ling could envision the lower regions of the sea, the unknown watery abyss where blind creatures swam, hunted and lived out their existence. Ai Ling suddenly felt infinitesimal, disembodied, her heartbeats insignificant against the mass of countless heartbeats that reverberated in the dark, echoing chamber of the sea. Along with this realisation, she also felt a jolt of surprise, as if she had only now been made known of the significance of her life, an experience so brief in its secret, elusive joy.

The morning sun had spread itself across the surface of the sea, which pulsated with light. Ai Ling stayed in the water, floating on her back, her face open to the sky. Her ears, submerged, picked up the clicking sounds of the sea, a rumbling of its interior, beating with life. The sunlight warmed her face. Ai Ling did not know how long she stayed in this position—her mind had slipped into a state of blissful thoughtlessness—when she heard a sharp sound, rising above the clamour of the sea. She lifted her head and turned towards the shore.

Standing at the edge of the water was the boy who had offered her a drink the day before, gesturing wildly. Ai Ling waved back and looked in the water around her and knew the cause of the boy’s excitement. What first looked like a bunch of small, translucent plastic bags discarded into the sea was actually a school of jellyfish, stringy tentacles hanging from the milky dome-like caps of their bodies. They were all around her. The boy’s piercing voice carried through the air like a siren.

With slow, nimble strokes, Ai Ling made her way carefully between and around the jellyfish, her heart leaping inside her each time she came close to one of the tentacles. Once she was finally clear of them, she pounded her way swiftly through the water, desperate to be back on land. She reached the shore, panting, but the boy was no longer there, only a trail of footsteps in the sand that disappeared further up the beach.

In her ears, Ai Ling could still hear an echo of the boy’s voice, fainter and weaker, until it disappeared completely.

CHEE SENG

I change into my old clothes and have a simple breakfast of gruel and salted black beans. Before we set off, the old woman brings me one last bowl of the bitter brew and has me drink it. Carrying the bundle of food she has prepared for me, she leads me out of the compound of the hut, past the furrowed plots of long beans, peas and water spinach, onto the cleared-out path that snakes into the dense forest. I follow her closely. I have no idea where she’s taking me, but I do not ask. We walk without stopping until the sun is hovering above the tree line. We finally exit the forest, the hardened-soil path widening out into a gravel-filled road. Coming to a stop at a clearing, the old woman looks at me. With a firm hand gesture, she tells me to stay put. She points to the end of the road, where it disappears down a slope, and stares in the direction for a few seconds. Then, after taking a last glance at me, she turns and re-enters the forest. I watch as she slips between the trees and vanishes out of sight.

No vehicle appears as I stand by the road, waiting. The day is becoming warmer. The dew on the grass has already dried up. The tall Casuarina trees lining the sides of the road stretch into the distance, the leaves rustling with the occasional breeze. The intermittent bursts of sharp trilling from birds hidden amongst the branches provide the only soundtrack to the quiet surroundings. I stretch my legs to work out the kinks. It has to be late morning now. I pick up the bundle by my feet and, glancing in both directions, decide to take the descending route, down the hill.

“I think it’s this way,” I said, pointing to a branching path that led into a thicket of bushes. We had been walking on the narrow, muddy path for the past twenty minutes and seemed to be heading nowhere. Cody, coming to a stop beside me, glanced at where I was indicating, his face a curtain of sweat.

“You sure?” he asked, taking a bottle of water out from his haversack and passing it to me. He wiped his face on the sleeve of his T-shirt, leaving dark stains. Since I was the one who had suggested the trek on our fourth date, I could not tell him what was worrying me, that we might be lost.

“Yes, it’ll lead us to the main route that will bring us back to the starting point,” I said.

Cody nodded, took a swig of water and went ahead of me onto the path. Then turning suddenly, he grabbed my hand and pulled me towards him. “You smell good when you sweat.” He took a long sniff and kissed my neck.

“Wish I could say the same thing about you,” I said.

“Well, guess you have to get used to it then.” He hugged me, and I could feel the wetness of his shirt against my body, soaking my shirt, touching my skin.

We walked for another three hours to get out of the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, having long run out of water and covered with scratches and bites. This incident later became a funny anecdote that Cody would tell our friends over dinners to illustrate the extent he had to go to woo me, that although he had known I had lost the way, he did not have the heart to tell me so.