Another damned afternoon of drilling. I imagine puce-coloured concrete cheese and holes over on the other side. Stupid yuppie fashion statement or boring, unimaginative hole-drilling, I wondered. Since I wasn’t stumbling from bed with a hangover from last night, I thought God had decided in His infinite grace to visit my head with one - with drilling machines. Drilling machines: precise, high-speed drill bits and concrete mess. A mess like last night.
I felt the pangs of guilt over unresolved filial duties early in the afternoon and decided to pitch in with the preparations. It consisted mostly of heavy lifting and getting ordered around by the parenting unit. “Chairs here and here” were typical, and so were orders to get ice, detergents, food and sweeping up the front porch. I had work to do, dammit, not cleaning up.
It left me sweaty and grimy in the most unflattering ways, the way semi-hard labour tends to. My bath was extra-long in protest, which put me about half an hour past the blessing of the food and influx of guests. Not my guests, anyway, but playing the host is a family tradition over here. Did I mention tireless host? The mingling and small talk began without incident. Since these were all Church people, I kept my gaze firmly from meeting their eyes; it’s not that I don’t like them, really - I despise them.
A few days ago, my youngest brother was helping out with Christmas decorations for a BCC (Basic Christian Community) gathering - they’ve got a different but deplorably similar acronym for it now, and I can’t remember it. Besides the same sort of heavy lifting I had to do yesterday, he was tasked with looking after the children for the adults. Knowing how he is, it’s wonder he kept his cool, bless him. When he came back, he looked flustered.
“Basket, I was walking back and this fella on a motorbike was staring at me!” he said. I unlocked the gate to let him in, and barely hearing that. “And he followed me all the way back here!”
That made me look up. It was already late, about 9.00pm. Our neighbourhood’s not the safest place on earth, if you must know. “Why was he doing that?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I was walking back from the busstop and this guy was staring at me as I was walking. So I stared back lah, and-”
“You stared back?” I said, keeping my voice down.
“Ya lah, then do what? Anyway, I just continued to walk lah, and he followed me all the way back!”
“Just don’t do anything stupid,” I said, locking the back gate and heading back into the kitchen. It was Boxing Day, I remember, and I had quite a number of things to do.
“That’s not the worst,” he said.
“What else happened?”
“I was looking after the kids, right? So, I was getting bored and I finished all the decorations with the others. And I wanted to come home. So before I left, I told this auntie I was leaving and she kept dragging me to the table with all the food,” he said. I didn’t see the problem: eat too little, eat too much, what?!
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“So I started eating lah, I took very little, just one or two pieces. And this guy, never seen him before and he comes up behind me and speaks to me in my ear. He talks very slowly lor, like I don’t understand English, and he says to me, ‘Don’t you think you should set an example for the other kids? You don’t have manners, ah?’ and I get damn pissed off lor,” my brother said, getting angry.
“He said that?” I asked, frowning.
“Yah, he said that! And I’ve never seen him before, he’s about 30 plus, don’t know who the hell he is,” my brother said.
“So what did you do?”
“I called him a son of a bitch and walked off,” he said, shrugging.
My eyes were big saucers when he said that: it’s really not the thing to do. And yet, I found myself wanting to look up this idiot 30-something and give him a piece of my fist. See, I think of myself as something else, with my younger brother: I had changed his diapers, fed him milk, fed him solid food, played with him, scolded him when he needed it, explained stuff to him when he asked, bathed him when he was younger, bought him his first guitar with my older brother, gave him his first real book to read, watched him grow up into the adult he now is - you get the picture.
“You show him to me the next time you see him,” I said, also shrugging.
That was a few days ago. The small talk last night was getting to me. I met some old family friends from Church, but they were almost all of the same stripe - they felt, I think, some need to impress on others how important their lives were. I walked past a cloud of loud assertions and declarations, realizing this was how a lot of people were like. Thankfully, I found myself talking to an old, Singaporean man who had moved in nearby.
He was out of place, definitely; loud, bulbous nose, in a untucked shirt and a pair of shorts only my father would see himself wearing. We talked and I realized after a few minutes I didn’t want to be talking to anyone else - he was unassuming and friendly, afflicted with the need to talk retirees seem to have. About an hour later we were gathered in my dining room for cake-cutting and song-singing. I excused myself, but couldn’t escape a mother’s propensity for photograph-taking.
As I stood beside our bar counter sipping on my drink, I watched faces swim before me like so many strange mismatches of colour. The din increased as the cake was cut, with much clapping of hands and singing - forcing “happy anniversary” from “happy birthday”. My younger brother came over with his girlfriend, wearing a forced, blank expression.
“I can’t believe it either,” he said.
“Yah, what a nice song,” I said, grinning. We watched as the clapping died. One of my mother’s colleagues suggested my father feed my mother some cake, to rioutous cheers. Touching, but cringe-worthy - and my father thought so as well, protesting and laughing. We stood there as the crowd thinned, and my brother leaned over and said to me, “You know, I don’t mind the kids and my friends, but it’s the adults I can’t stand”.
I smiled.